By Michael D. Shear and Maggie Haberman
Washington – Last week, the president Donald Trump He held an indoor campaign rally with thousands of supporters who were not wearing face masks and cheering for him despite the fact that a deadly virus is spreading across the country.
Trump began to relax the restrictions established in the White House since Washington imposed an order to stay home in March in response to the pandemic of the coronavirus, and invited the President of Poland to hold meetings for a day. Later on Thursday, he flew to Wisconsin to brag about an economic recovery that he says is just around the corner.
However, by Friday it was impossible to ignore the fact that the pandemic, which for weeks the White House had said was losing steam, is doing just the opposite.
The increase in numbers in Texas, Florida and Arizona also shows this, as well as the fact that these are the states in which the president and his Republican allies have urged people to return to normalcy.
In response to the feeling of increasing concern about the new figures, the vice president Mike Pence and members of the coronavirus task force held a public press conference for the first time in two months.
But always loyal to Trump’s wishes for good news, Pence tried to cautiously handle the statistics that Deborah L. Birx, the task force coordinator, noted, indicating that cases and hospitalizations were on the rise in Florida, Texas. , Arizona and other states.
“We have had a truly remarkable progress in the work of moving our country forward,” said the vice president. “We have all seen the encouraging news as we restarted activities,” he added, and made no suggestion that outbreaks across the southern part of the country could lead to a further suspension of activities, which Trump wishes with all his might to finish. “The reality is that we are in a much better situation”.
However, Pence’s comments contrasted with a very different message from Birx and Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease expert, who alerted to flaws in the testing system and said the outbreaks could ruin the country.
“If we don’t end this outbreak, even those who are doing well will sooner or later be prone to contagion,” he warned. “So we have to take that into consideration because we are all in this together. And the only way we’re going to end it is by eliminating it together. ”
The reappearance of the task force’s televised press conference (in which reporters were limited to a few questions) reactivated the deep separation between Washington and the states where local officials were raising the alarm on Friday and, in some cases, suspending the return to the activities that Trump has promoted so frequently.
In Florida, the Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, who has refused to back down on the economic revival, banned drinks from being served in bars after saying that customers were not complying with social distancing rules. In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott, also a Republican, went further and ordered the closure of bars across the state. On Friday, Judge Lina Hidalgo of Harris County, the largest in Texas, re-imposed the order to stay home and considered the increase in cases as “a catastrophic and unsustainable situation.”
All of this is discouraging news regarding a pandemic that continues to threaten public health, the country’s economy, and the President’s political future.
At a time when poll figures cast doubt on whether he can win a second term in November, Trump faces the possibility that his efforts to boost the economy by downplaying the virus have been counterproductive. Instead of coming to summer with a recovering country, the president will be forced to explain how his response to the coronavirus contributed to its resurgence, perhaps forcing Americans to return to a damaging suspension of activities.
However, Trump did not appear at the task force’s press conference to voice his concern. Instead, an hour after it ended, the president addressed a panel of industrial officials, political allies, and economic advisers from the White House to hold a self-praise session on how successful the economic recovery has been.
In celebrating his victory, Trump did not mention the increase in cases across the country and highlighted a message he posted on Twitter on Thursday night: “Our economy is rebounding and will NOT be suspended. We will extinguish ‘eruptions’ or outbursts whenever necessary! ”
Now his advisers are looking for a way to offer Trump the traveling program he wants, without neglecting the widespread fear of the coronavirus and facilitating adequate sanitary measures. At the same time, the White House has shelved health checks that it had implemented for several weeks, such as taking body temperatures, for people entering the complex.
One of the states in which cases are increasing dramatically is Florida, where Trump insisted that the Republican National Convention be moved to the end of August to fulfill his desire to have a large-scale event where there were no measures of social distancing. So far, Republicans hope to put on a show in Jacksonville honoring Trump, First Lady Melania Trump, and Pence with three nights of events that could convene about 12,000 people.
In recent days, some of the president’s political allies have signaled that they want to take the virus threat more seriously.
Speaking in front of a group of health professionals in Morehead, Kentucky, Mitch McConnell, the Republican senator from Kentucky and the leader of the majority in the Senate, only used a simple mask.
“Until we find a vaccine, these are very important,” said the senator. “It is less complicated than using a respirator. It is a way of showing that we want to protect others. During this period, until we find a vaccine, we all have to think not only about protecting ourselves, but also others. ”
But in any case, Trump, Pence and the rest of the high government officials have apparently decided in the last 24 hours to assume a political reality prior to the coronavirus, although the medical data contradicts it.
On Thursday night, the Trump government asked the Supreme Court to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act, a proposal that, if successful, would end forever the health insurance program popularly known as Obamacare and would remove its coverage for 23 million Americans.
In an 82-page report, the government joined Republican officials in Texas and seventeen other states to argue that in 2017, the then-Republican-controlled Congress had made that law unconstitutional when it removed the tax penalty for not purchasing insurance, which is known as an individual mandate.
The president’s argument will undoubtedly reignite Washington’s fierce political debate over access to affordable health care even as the growing pandemic has left millions of Americans unemployed without employer-provided health care coverage.
Sheryl Stolberg contributed to this report.
– .
Related
