Governors: Trump making ‘delusional’ comments on
testing and restrictions
State leaders say they cannot embark on Trump’s
three-phase program to ease stay-at-home orders without widespread testing
Virginia Governor Ralph Northam: ‘We don’t even have
enough swabs. For the national level to say that we have what we need, and
really to have no guidance to the state levels, is just irresponsible.’
Richard
Luscombe in Miami and Edward Helmore in New York
Published
onSun 19 Apr 2020 20.02 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/19/coronavirus-governors-trump-making-delusional-comments
US
governors have accused Donald Trump of making “delusional” and “dangerous”
statements amid mounting tensions between the president and state leaders over
coronavirus testing and pressure to roll back stay-at-home measures.
The United
States has by far the world’s largest number of confirmed coronavirus cases,
with more than 730,000 infections and over 39,600 deaths.
Many state
leaders have said they cannot embark on Trump’s recommended three-phrase
programme to ease stay-at-home restrictions without a robust and widespread
system of testing in place.
Researchers
at Harvard University have suggested the US should conduct more than three
times the number of coronavirus tests it is currently administering over the
course of the next month, the New York Times reported.
Democratic
governor Ralph Northam of Virginia told CNN on Sunday that claims by Trump and
Vice-President Mike Pence that states have plenty of tests were “just
delusional”.
“We have
been fighting for testing,” he said on CNN’s State of the Union. “We don’t even
have enough swabs, believe it or not. For the national level to say that we
have what we need, and really to have no guidance to the state levels, is just
irresponsible, because we’re not there yet.”
Maryland,
Virginia and Washington DC are still seeing increasing cases even as the center
of the US outbreak, New York, has started to see some declines. Boston and
Chicago are also emerging hot spots with recent surges in cases and deaths.
“The
administration I think is trying to ramp up testing, they are doing some things
with respect to private labs,” said Republican governor Larry Hogan of Maryland
during a CNN interview. “But to try to push this off, to say the governors have
plenty of testing and they should just get to work on testing, somehow we aren’t
doing our jobs, is just absolutely false.”
Several
states, including Ohio, Texas and Florida, have said they aim to reopen parts
of their economies, perhaps by 1 May or even sooner, but appeared to be staying
cautious.
The White
House guidelines released late last week on reopening the economy recommend a
state record 14 days of declining case numbers before gradually lifting
restrictions. Yet in a series of tweets from Trump on Friday, the president
called for the “liberation” of Minnesota, Michigan and Virginia, Democratic-led
states with strict stay-at-home orders, and appeared to be the catalyst for
protests backed by rightwing groups in several places, including Texas,
Maryland and Ohio.
In his
tweet on Friday the president claimed without evidence that Virginia citizens’
second amendment rights were “under siege” after Northam signed into law
tighter firearms restrictions a week earlier.
In Austin,
the Texas state capital, protesters called on Trump to fire Dr Anthony Fauci,
the leading US expert on infectious diseases, from his task force tackling the
pandemic crisis.
Washington
governor Jay Inslee, a Democrat who on Friday blasted Trump’s tweets as
“unhinged rantings”, and one of the most vocal critics of the president,
reinforced his position on Sunday.
“I don’t
know any other way to characterize it,” Inslee told host George Stephanopoulos
on ABC’s This Week. “To have an American president encourage people to violate
the law, I can’t remember any time during my time in America where we have seen
such a thing. And it is dangerous because it can inspire people to ignore
things that actually can save their lives.
“It is
doubly frustrating to us governors because this is such a schizophrenia. The
president is basically asking people, ‘Please ignore Dr Fauci and Dr Birx
[White House taskforce medical advisers], please ignore my own guidelines that
I set forth,’ because those guidelines made very clear… that you cannot open up
Michigan today, or Virginia, under those guidelines. You need to see a decline
in the infections and fatalities. And that simply has not happened yet.”
Pence
insisted in an interview aired on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday that the
country had “sufficient capacity” for any state to go to the phase one level.
But Hogan
and others said the issue was not as straightforward as Pence presented it.
“Every
governor in America has been pushing and fighting and clawing to get more
tests, not only from the federal government, but from every private lab in
America and from all across the world. It’s not accurate to say there’s plenty
of testing out there, and the governors should just get it done.”
Hogan said
he was sympathetic to the protesters. “I’m frustrated also,” he said. “But I
don’t think it’s helpful to encourage demonstrations. To encourage people to go
protest the plan that you just made recommendations on, it just doesn’t make
any sense. We’re sending completely conflicting messages out to the governors
and to the people, as if we should ignore federal policy and federal
recommendations.”
Gretchen
Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan, where some of the earliest
protests took place last week, once again strongly defended strict lockdown
restrictions in her state, the 10th largest by population but third highest in
the nation in terms of Covid-19 deaths.
“My stay-home
order is one of the nation’s more conservative but the fact of the matter is
it’s working. We are seeing the curve start to flatten and that means we’re
saving lives,” she said.
“[But] I
can tell you, we could double or even triple the number of tests if we had the
swabs and reagents. That’s precisely why it would really be incredibly helpful
if the federal government would use the Defense Production Act to start making
these swabs and reagents, so we can improve testing.”
Trump and Fauci: America's future hangs on this
delicate relationship
The coronavirus pandemic has created an unlikely
pairing as a fearful nation looks to the two men to save it from further
disaster
by Tom
McCarthy
Sun 19 Apr
2020 10.00 BSTLast modified on Mon 20 Apr 2020 02.31 BST
As the Aids
crisis accelerated in the 1980s, Donald Trump, then building his brand as a
boldface name in the New York City tabloids, reacted with paranoia,
ruthlessness and bigotry.
When his
bosom friend and mentor Roy Cohn contracted the virus, Trump “dropped him like
a hot potato”, Cohn’s secretary has said. Trump told dinner guests that
following Cohn’s final visit to his Mar-a-Lago resort, “I had to spend a
fortune to fumigate all the dishes and silverware”. The Associated Press
reported in 1991 that Trump “asks women to take an Aids test at his doctor’s
office before he wines and dines them”.
Over the
same decade, in Bethesda, Maryland, grappling with the HIV epidemic became the
life’s work of a fellow New York native, Dr Anthony Fauci. Fauci was one of the
first scientists to document “severe opportunistic infections among apparently
previously healthy homosexual men”. His lab at the National Institute of
Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) led the charge for a cure, and he
became the public face of the government’s fight to stop the virus.
In the
intervening 30 years, Fauci has continued his life’s work, leading the effort
to contain infectious diseases from Sars to Ebola to swine flu. Trump,
meanwhile, has gone from playboy to TV star to US president.
That last
extraordinary leap, and the rise in the last four months of the deadly Covid-19
pandemic, has now created a most unlikely and delicate partnership between
Trump and Fauci on which the future of the country hinges. The two men appear
to share little by way of philosophy, but each night they share a stage in
front of a scared nation in the grip of a terrifying pandemic; a nation looking
to these two very different men to save it from further disaster.
For Fauci,
79, facing down this coronavirus is a date with destiny he has been working his
entire life toward. For Trump, 73, the coronavirus is a rare brush with
accountability, a moment when boasts and threats and lies do not work.
To achieve
success according to their respective definitions of the word, the two men need
each other. Trump needs Fauci to shore up fading public trust in his
administration’s disaster response. Fauci needs Trump to take action that saves
lives.
Their
purposes have been mostly – though not always – well aligned. But the rise of
an anti-Fauci movement on the political right – and the president’s frequent
intolerance for being overshadowed – have fueled concerns that for all its
practical necessity, and the stakes for the nation, the Fauci-Trump partnership
could come to pieces.
Tony was just a master at relationships
Derek
Hodel, worked with Fauci in the 1990s
If that
happens, said Derek Hodel, a senior program adviser at Physicians for Human
Rights who worked with Fauci as an Aids activist and advocate in the 1990s, it
would be a rare defeat for Fauci’s political skills.
“Tony was
just a master at relationships,” Hodel said. “This is his sixth administration,
and although the dynamics of the Trump administration are louder and crazier
than any other administration, they’re not all of them different.”
After
graduating at the top of his class from Cornell medical school in the Vietnam
war era, Fauci fulfilled a public health service requirement by taking a researcher
post at NIAID, where he became director in 1984. He would spend the next five
decades there, surfacing in the public eye whenever the country was confronted
with the specter of bio-terror (anthrax) or deadly contagion (Ebola).
Working
with the current president, Fauci appears to sense that keeping his job depends
on keeping Trump happy. When he has contradicted Trump, he has usually done so
gently.
When Trump
pushed the lupus drug hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure, Fauci said: “In
terms of science, I don’t think we can definitively say it works.” Asked by
Science magazine why he did not rebut Trump’s overblown claims about the
efficacy of a ban on foreign travelers from China, Fauci said: “Let’s get real,
what do you want me to do? … I can’t jump in front of the microphone and push
him down.”
The White
House last week dismissed questions about tension between Trump and Fauci as
“media chatter” and said: “President Trump is not firing Dr Fauci.”
But the
drumbeat of calls for Fauci to be ousted have been promoted most aggressively
by pro-Trump zealots in the far-right media ecosystem – political
bomb-throwers, medical quacks and an unknown number of foreign bots posing as
American internet users.
The critics
blame Fauci and his fellow scientists for the economic misery tied to the
government’s social distancing recommendations – omitting any calculation of
what economic and human disaster would result if the viral floodgates were
opened.
There are
indications that the online mob is gaining traction with the president and
other elected officials – and with the American public. Last week, Trump
retweeted one Fauci critic with the hashtag #FireFauci.
The voices
are growing louder. The Republican congressman Andy Biggs of Arizona said on a
radio show last week: “I think it’s time for Dr Fauci to move along … He’s
emasculated the economy and is just totally tone-deaf on that.”
The
far-right commentator Laura Ingraham complained last week that it was “time to
get your freedom back”, tweeting footage of people sitting in a line of cars in
a Michigan protest against social distancing. The more extreme critics accuse
Fauci of being a “deep state plant” with a shadowy agenda.
It is not
the first time Fauci has encountered blowback from telling hard scientific
truths.
Decades ago,
[Fauci] said things that we didn’t want to hear ... about the pace of research,
about the inability to pull a cure out of his hat
Derek Hodel
“Decades
ago, he said things that we didn’t want to hear,” said Hodel, the Aids
activist. “He said a lot of things we did want to hear as well, but he said a
lot of things we didn’t want to hear, about the pace of research, about the
inability to pull a cure out of his hat, about the need for safe sex, early
on.”
As a boy in
Brooklyn growing up in the postwar boom years, Fauci delivered prescriptions on
his bicycle for the family business, a pharmacy. He went to Catholic schools
and at 5ft 7in was a standout basketball star. He was awarded the presidential
medal of freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, in 2008. Fauci has been
married 35 years, has three daughters, is an avid jogger and – in contrast to
the “executive time” loving president – is also a notoriously industrious
worker who frequently clocks 15 hour days.
On his
philosophy for working with political leaders, Fauci has told the New Yorker’s
Michael Specter that he “relies on the pseudo-Latin expression Illegitimi non
carborundum: don’t let the bastards grind you down.
“You stay
completely apolitical and non-ideological, and you stick to what it is that you
do,” Fauci said. “I’m a scientist and I’m a physician. And that’s it.”
An adamant
78% majority of Americans approves of Fauci’s performance, according to a
Quinnipiac poll this month that found Trump’s approval rating at 46%.
Hodel said
Fauci was motivated by a lifelong dedication to science and by an equal
dedication to people.
“I have
great confidence in Dr Fauci’s ability to maintain his integrity and to speak
the truth. And this is probably not the first time that his career was at risk.
I can also say with great confidence that when history is written, Dr Fauci
will be the hero.”
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