'As Trump Ignores Virus Crisis, Republicans Start To Break Ranks': NYT
'As Trump Ignores Virus Crisis, Republicans Start to Break Ranks. By Alexander Burns, Jonathan Martin & Maggie Haberman, 4 hrs ago.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/as-trump-ignores-virus-crisis-republicans-start-to-break-ranks/ar-BB16W1rh
President Trump’s failure to contain the coronavirus outbreak and his refusal to promote clear public-health guidelines have left many senior Republicans despairing that he will ever play a constructive role in addressing the crisis, with some concluding they must work around Mr. Trump and ignore or even contradict his pronouncements. In recent days, some of the most prominent figures in the G.O.P. outside the White House have broken with Mr. Trump over issues like the value of wearing a mask in public and heeding the advice of health experts like Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, whom the president and other hard-right figures within the administration have subjected to caustic personal criticism. They appear to be spurred by several overlapping forces, including deteriorating conditions in their own states, Mr. Trump’s seeming indifference to the problem and the approach of a presidential election in which Mr. Trump is badly lagging his Democratic challenger, Joseph R. Biden Jr., in the polls.
Once-reticent Republican governors are now issuing orders on mask-wearing and business restrictions that run counter to Mr. Trump’s demands. Some of those governors have been holding late-night phone calls among themselves to trade ideas and grievances; they have sought out partners in the administration other than the president, including Vice President Mike Pence, who, despite echoing Mr. Trump in public, is seen by governors as far more attentive to the continuing disaster. “The president got bored with it,” David Carney, an adviser to the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, a Republican, said of the pandemic. He noted that Mr. Abbott directs his requests to Mr. Pence, with whom he speaks two to three times a week.
A handful of Republican lawmakers in the Senate have privately pressed the administration to bring back health briefings led by figures like Dr. Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, who regularly updated the public during the spring until Mr. Trump upstaged them with his own briefing-room monologues. And in his home state of Kentucky last week, Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, broke with Mr. Trump on nearly every major issue related to the virus. Mr. McConnell stressed the importance of mask-wearing, expressed “total” confidence in Dr. Fauci and urged Americans to follow guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that Mr. Trump has ignored or dismissed. “The straight talk here that everyone needs to understand is: This is not going away until we get a vaccine,” Mr. McConnell said on Wednesday, contradicting Mr. Trump’s rosy predictions. The result is a quiet but widening breach between Mr. Trump and leading figures in his party, as the virus burns through major political battlegrounds in the South and the West, like in the states of AZ, TX and GA.
Amid mounting alarm in a huge portion of the country, Mr. Trump has at times appeared to inhabit a different universe, incorrectly predicting the outbreak would quickly dissipate and falsely claiming the spread of the virus was simply a function of increased testing. With his impatient demands and decrees, Mr. Trump has disrupted efforts to mitigate the crisis while effectively sidelining himself from participating in those efforts. Some of the states where outbreaks have worsened most in recent weeks are led by Republicans who spent months avoiding stringent lockdowns, in some cases because state leaders were uneasy about creating space between themselves and a president of their own party who rejected such steps. That dynamic has been particularly pronounced in Southern states like MS, AL and FL, where governors have either continued to resist tough public-health restrictions or have only recently and partially embraced them...
= new reply since forum marked as read
