Senior administration officials and Trump advisers say the level of hostility between the president and governors will probably only increase in the coming days
President Donald Trump is preparing for a long battle with America’s governors to save himself from the political fallout from coronavirus.
“People’s initial reaction is always to look to the president, but as time goes on and it becomes clear other states are doing other things, that blame and credit will shift to the governors, considering they are the ones making the calls,” one Trump political adviser said. The administration’s guidelines for reopening cities and towns, released on Thursday, urged states to have the ability to test any individuals who showed symptoms of Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, before reopening — even as both Republican and Democratic governors said they needed help tracking down testing supplies.
White House aides have argued that states need to do a better job of using hospital and private labs to ramp up testing, even as critics of the Trump administration say the president should deploy the Defense Protection Act to force manufacturers to produce the supplies needed for tests like swabs. The president said at a briefing Sunday night he would use the Defense Production Act to produce swabs for coronavirus tests, though he did not offer additional details.
“And we’re sending him ventilators and ventilators,” Navarro added. “And it turns out that a lot of those wound up sitting in warehouses. And no American who needs a ventilator has not had one. And we’re going to see the same thing with other kinds of things, including the testing kits.”Several governors also disagree with the administration over the best way to procure medical supplies and equipment — as well as the guidelines to even restart the economy.
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