At Saturday’s briefing, Mnuchin specifically cited the airlines, cruise ships and hotels as industries that have faced significant challenges from the abrupt crash in global travel and tourism.
Trump’s desire to leap to the assistance of certain industries stems in part from witnessing an upward swing in U.S. markets after he designated the coronavirus outbreak a national emergency on Friday. The declaration had been in the works already, but was pushed up amid historic volatility in financial markets — much of which stemmed from an Oval Office address Wednesday night in which Trump stated he was banning all travel and imports from Europe, which the administration had to later clarify did not block all products and included only the 26-member countries of the unrestricted travel Schengen zone. (The ban will be extended to the U.K. and Ireland, which aren’t members of Schengen.) Trump also claimed insurers would cover the full cost of testing and treatment — generating alarm from health plans that never agreed to waive all patient costs.
Outside the White House, many of the president’s political allies viewed Wednesday’s Oval Office address as a speech that quickly needed a do-over. Staring directly into a camera while seated with his hands crossed was not the best format for the president, Trump’s own aides later admitted.
The crushing response on Thursday prompted the White House to schedule Friday’s press conference in the Rose Garden, a favorite venue of the president thanks to its natural lighting and the more free-wheeling format of a back-and-forth press conference, according to two White House officials familiar with the matter.
The president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner — among the few officials to maintain the president’s trust throughout his term — also became much more deeply involved in the coronavirus response efforts later in the week as it became clear the White House needed a more forceful response, a senior administration official said.
Internally, aides started to blame officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for flawed testing kits and the amount of time it took to get results back. The administration’s internal criticism of the CDC has made the agency the latest scapegoat as Trump’s team sought to deflect blame and cushion the president from what could become devastating political blowback against the president and his party in the coming months.
Morale inside the White House bottomed out on Friday, said a third senior administration official, but turned a corner once the Food and Drug Administration approved a new COVID-19 detection test from the pharmaceutical company Roche as part of an emergency authorization.
“They reached the conclusion this week that they had to communicate a sense of seriousness about what was going on and had to reassure the country that they were taking it very seriously,” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who remains a close ally of Trump. “Having major companies like Wal-Mart, CVS, etc. involved means suddenly you begin to see how you can move to scale for a country for our size.”
The Friday Rose Garden speech, where Trump announced a public-private partnership on testing and the immediate opening of emergency operation centers across the U.S., also helped propel a stock market surge in the final hour of trading. One official later bragged the speech alone caused the “biggest market jump ever.”
Trump has repeatedly boasted about the stock market’s rebound after the S&P 500 recorded its best single-day performance since 2008 on Friday — a 9% gain, reversing a Thursday plunge that marked the worst day since 1987’s “Black Monday” crash. On Saturday, an unusually jovial Trump said he was “honored” to see positive movement in the markets following his news conference the day before — even joking that he should up the volume of his public appearances to further boost investor confidence.
“I think we should do one of them every day perhaps. Maybe five times per day. That was something to watch,” he said.
But not every element of the president’s course correction has gone smoothly.
Representatives from Google said they were caught off guard on Friday when Trump said the tech company was “helping to develop a website … to determine whether a test is warranted and to facilitate testing at a nearby convenient location” for Americans who suspect they may have contracted the coronavirus. In a statement shared on Twitter from Verily, a subsidiary of Google, the company said it is still “developing a tool to help triage individuals for COVID-19 testing” that would initially only be available in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Elsewhere in his remarks, Trump disavowed involvement in disbanding a pandemic unit within the White House National Security Council and about the travel restrictions he has imposed on European countries. The president, more than three years into a presidency in which he has eagerly ejected pre-Trump officials, also blamed the Obama administration for testing shortages in the U.S. that have undermined containment efforts and sowed chaos at some hospitals.
“I don’t take responsibility at all because we were given a set of circumstances and we were given rules, regulations, and specifications from a different time,” Trump told reporters, while complaining that his predecessor “didn’t do testing” during the 2009 swine flu outbreak. (In fact, diagnostic kits shipped just weeks after the CDC identified the first case of the virus in April 2009.)
Indeed, blaming his predecessors for troubles with his own administration’s handling of the current pandemic has become a common tactic of late. He accused former Vice President Joe Biden, the front-runner in the Democratic presidential primary, on Thursday of overseeing “one of the worst [responses] on record” to a nationwide health epidemic, in reference to that H1N1 outbreak during Obama’s first year in office.
Trump also claimed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has been working with top Trump aides this week on an emergency aid package, was “trying to create a panic” when his administration faced criticism in late February about its slow response to the coronavirus outbreak.
He blamed Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell for contributing to the economic pullback by refusing to cut interest rates — despite historic action by the central bank this week to combat chaos in financial markets and an emergency rate cut last week.
As economic relief legislation stalled in the House on Friday, Trump said it was congressional Democrats’ fault because “all of a sudden they didn’t agree to certain things that they agreed to.”
“He has never accepted blame for things that have gone wrong under his watch. Why would he do so now?” said one Republican close to the White House, who claimed the tactic “has worked in the past” for the president.
Although White House aides felt confident about Trump’s message on Friday about testing and the stimulus package passed by the House early Saturday, aides also acknowledged that the next step in rescuing the economy — deciding which industries to bail out — will be much harder politically.
The potential cost of an industry bailout could upset Republican lawmakers who have grumbled for years about the ballooning national debt under their watch after fighting the Obama administration over even smaller deficits and debt levels.
“It quickly devolves into industry vs. industry and parochial stuff,” said one former senior administration official.
Trump also remains intent on pushing for a payroll tax cut through the end of the year, continuing to drop it into his public remarks.
“If you want to get money into the hands of people quickly & efficiently, let them have the full money that they earned, APPROVE A PAYROLL TAX CUT until the end of the year, December 31. Then you are doing something that is really meaningful. Only that will make a big difference!” he tweeted on Friday.
Democrats and Senate Republicans have been cool to that idea, in part because of the eye-popping price tag ($950 billion according to one estimate) and concerns among economists about whether it would be effective in preventing a severe economic downturn.
As the president entered the weekend, however, he appeared intent on striking a more unifying tone. Before meeting with members of the coronavirus task force at the White House, Trump commended the “good teamwork between Republicans & Democrats” that led to the House’s passage of a bill that will expand paid emergency leave and provide tax credits for workers and employers affected by the coronavirus crisis. The legislation also includes $1 billion in food aid for low-income Americans.
“People really pulled together. Nice to see!” Trump tweeted.
He even praised the media — whom he accused last week of trying to “inflame the CoronaVirus situation far beyond what the facts would warrant” — for recent coverage of his administration’s response to the crisis.
“Over the past 24 hours, I think the representation has been very fair. It’s been very fair,” Trump told reporters on Saturday.
Source: politico.com
See more here: news365.stream
