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Trump’s remarkable public campaign against testing, a vivid example of how he often waged war with science and his own administration’s experts and stated policies. But more testing meant overall cases were destined to go up, undercutting the president’s push to crank up the economy. States needed declining cases to reopen, or at least a declining rate of positive tests. The president quickly came to feel trapped by his own reopening guidelines. Trump’s rush to urge a return to normal would help undercut the social distancing and other measures that were holding down the numbers. Colleagues described her as dedicated to public health and working herself to exhaustion to get the data right, but her model-based assessment nonetheless failed to account for a vital variable: how Mr. Birx was more central than publicly known to the judgment inside the West Wing that the virus was on a downward path. Fauci as a purveyor of dire warnings but no solutions and blamed officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for mishandling the early stages of the virus.ĭr. Officials in the West Wing saw the better-known White House coronavirus task force as dysfunctional, came to view Dr. Meadows’s daily meetings, by aides who for the most part had no experience with public health emergencies and were taking their cues from the president. Key elements of the administration’s strategy were formulated out of sight in Mr. Now, interviews with more than two dozen officials inside the administration and in the states, and a review of emails and documents, reveal previously unreported details about how the White House put the nation on its current course during a fateful period this spring. Trump had missed or dismissed mounting signals of the impending crisis in the early months of the year.
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Fauci and continue to distort reality even as it became clear that his hopes for a rapid rebound in the economy and his electoral prospects were not materializing.
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He and his top aides would openly disdain the scientific research into the disease and the advice of experts on how to contain it, seek to muzzle more authoritative voices like Dr. They referred to this as “state authority handoff,” and it was at the heart of what would become at once a catastrophic policy blunder and an attempt to escape blame for a crisis that had engulfed the country - perhaps one of the greatest failures of presidential leadership in generations. Provide more testing.īut their ultimate goal was to shift responsibility for leading the fight against the pandemic from the White House to the states. Meadows’s conference table and on a couch in his office down the hall from the Oval Office, they saw their immediate role as practical problem solvers.
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WASHINGTON - Each morning at 8 as the coronavirus crisis was raging in April, Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, convened a small group of aides to steer the administration through what had become a public health, economic and political disaster. Follow our live coverage of the 2020 election between Joe Biden and President Trump.
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