If Trump sends Americans back to work and allows businesses to open their doors too soon and the virus spreads even further, he could extend Americans’ self-quarantine by weeks or even months. But if the economy remains stalled — leaving millions more people to lose their jobs and countless businesses to go bankrupt — then Trump will have overseen an even deeper downturn that devastates his reelection prospects.
The question now is whether the competing factions within the White House can offer the president an analytical approach by which he can make key decisions. White House staffers already worry about a messy chain of command — and the fact that key points or data will become lost in a mess of communication as individuals or different teams pursue their various projects, according to interviews with a dozen senior administration officials, Trump advisers and Republicans close to the White House.
Amid the confusing environment, the White House’s new chief of staff, Mark Meadows, officially begins his job on Monday. The chief-of-staff wing of the White House is in flux, with new aides to Meadows starting their positions while staffers aligned with his predecessor, Mick Mulvaney, have moved out of the West Wing and into offices in the adjacent Eisenhower Executive Office building.
Meadows “is just walking into a perfect storm,” said Chris Whipple, author of “The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency.”
“It is almost a White House that was designed to fail from Day One,” Whipple said. “Now, you’ve got a crisis meeting a president who ran against the whole idea of government and who thinks the federal bureaucracy is a deep state out to get him. Now, he has to be able to mobilize that deep state to save us all.”
In a statement, the White House press office dismissed the staffing considerations as “palace intrigue.”
“President Trump and his entire Administration are focused on leading this whole-of-government response to slow the spread of COVID-19, expand testing capacities, and expedite vaccine development. The goal is for America to be healthy, prosperous, and again open for business, and that’s what we are all working toward,” said Judd Deere, deputy White House press secretary.
Meadows has tried recently to insert himself into the administration’s response by gathering information from his former congressional colleagues on what would be most helpful for their states, and then bringing that input back to the White House for the president and the task force to use as guidance. Trump’s incoming chief of staff spent Saturday traveling with the president and a small group of administration officials to a Naval base in Norfolk, Va., where Trump ceremoniously dispatched a hospital ship, the USNS Comfort, to New York Harbor.
Source: politico.com
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