In case you were wondering why he changed his mind…
The numbers the health officials showed President Trump were overwhelming. With the peak of the coronavirus pandemic still weeks away, he was told, hundreds of thousands of Americans could face death if the country reopened too soon.
But there was another set of numbers that also helped persuade Mr. Trump to shift gears on Sunday and abandon his goal of restoring normal life by Easter. Political advisers described for him polling that showed that voters overwhelmingly preferred to keep containment measures in place over sending people back to work prematurely.
The article says he was equally concerned with the death projections as the polling. But I think we know what turned the tide, don’t we?
At Monday’s briefing, Mr. Trump recycled his line from a couple of weeks ago putting the virus ahead of the economy among his concerns. “The economy is No. 2 on my list,” he said. “First, I want to save a lot of lives.”
Indeed, he again accentuated the starkest projections given to him by public health officials, noting that more than two million Americans could have died in the absence of any measure, perhaps to set expectations so that any eventual death toll below that can be cast as a victory.
This is pretty obviously the case. I’m not sure everyone’s going to be all that relived if we only end up with 80 or 90 thousands deaths over the next few months. But I’m sure Trump will spin it as a huge accomplishment. In fact, he already is.
Trump’s erratic behavior over the course of the last month as the crisis grew and grew while he lurched from one message to another was apparently exacerbated by the fact that his stable genius had led him to fire his chief of staff without having his replacement ready to go in the midst of the greatest challenge of his presidency:
The president’s swerving messages came during a period when he had no fully installed White House chief of staff to guide him and run his operation. He fired Mick Mulvaney, the acting chief of staff, on March 6 and named Representative Mark Meadows of North Carolina, a close Republican ally, to replace him. But Mr. Meadows waited more than three weeks to actually resign his House seat, making it official only at 5 p.m. Monday, and will formally start his new job on Tuesday.
In the interim, Mr. Meadows has been spotted in the West Wing and has attended meetings, but he has only begun to assemble his team, and many holdovers in the White House are nervous about job security as they try to focus on the virus. Michael McKenna, the deputy legislative director, resigned under pressure last week after being accused of making an offensive statement in what some saw as a precursor to a broader shake-up.
Mr. Meadows will bring with him Ben Williamson, his congressional chief of staff, and John C. Fleming, an assistant commerce secretary and Republican former congressman from Louisiana, both of whom will serve him as senior advisers. Other new hires are expected to follow.
Perfect. A bunch of right-wing newbies coming in, jockeying for power, cluelessly trying to find the light switches while the bodies are piling up. Excellent timing all around.
He’s quite a manager. No wonder he managed to go bankrupt in the casino business.