Trump wants to be star of the opening act

Trump: My 'authority is total'

President Donald Trump said Monday he isn't sure yet when he thinks the country should start reopening, but once he decides, governors must fall in line behind him.

That's an abrupt change from a week ago, when Trump said he'd run into a "constitutional problem" if he tried to compel the handful of governors who balked at issuing statewide stay-at-home orders to do so. But while closing up was a states' matter, Trump wants reopening to be his show.

“When somebody is president of the United States, the authority is total," Trump said at Monday's White House coronavirus briefing. “The governors know that" and “the president of the United States calls the shots,” he said.

Did he discuss this idea with governors, and did they agree with them? “I haven't asked anybody. You know why? Because I don't have to,” Trump said. The president said at one point he might not have to invoke such absolute and constitutionally questionable powers, but "I have the ultimate authority."

No, he doesn't, shot back New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo during call-ins to cable news shows. "You don't become king because of a national emergency," Cuomo told CNN. "Why he would even go there, I have no idea,” Cuomo said on MSNBC. If Trump tried to force the state to ease its shutdown before Cuomo thought it was safe to do so, "we would be off to a lawsuit," the governor said.

Cuomo joined the governors of six other Northeast states — New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and Delaware — to coordinate when to ease their restrictions. A similar coalition was formed on the West Coast by California, Oregon and Washington.

Cuomo said that although the states might not end up with the same plan, they will collaborate to not work at cross purposes and undermine one another. “Yes, we've never been here before, but that doesn't mean you can't ensure public confidence that you're doing everything you can to do it in a smart way, an informed way, guided by experts and data and science,” Cuomo said. For more, see Newsday's story by Yancey Roy.

Fauci inoculates Trump

When Trump on Sunday retweeted a fan's message that ended with the hashtag #FireFauci, hours after Dr. Anthony Fauci said earlier stay-at-home shutdowns could have saved more lives, the president's posting set off inevitable speculation.

The White House waited until Monday to comment. “This media chatter is ridiculous — President Trump is not firing Dr. Fauci," spokesman Hogan Gidley said. Gidley didn't explain the hashtag retweet. Trump later said it was someone's opinion and "I don't mind controversy."

That was during Monday's wild briefing. Shortly after it began, Trump called Fauci to the mic, and the nation's top infectious diseases expert said he wanted to clarify that his remark wasn't blaming the president. He said Trump agreed to strong mitigation steps last month — including the stay-at-home guidelines — "the first and only time that Dr. [Deborah] Birx [the White House coronavirus response coordinator] and I formally made a recommendation to the president.”

Fauci also said his own comment Sunday in a CNN interview — about having faced "pushback" — was "the wrong choice of words."

Fauci then stepped away from the lectern, but Trump was just getting started. For more than a half-hour, while the audience at home waited for the latest updates on the coronavirus fight, Trump ripped media accounts of his hesitation over critical weeks in February and early March to take decisive action. The president showed a video largely recycled from a campaign ad and edited to suggest he had been on top of the threat while others were not.

"Everything we did was right," Trump said. When CBS News reporter Paula Reid pressed him for answers on what steps he took to combat the virus in February — a period during which he kept minimizing the threat publicly — Trump repeatedly declined to give examples and lashed out at Reid. He said, “You know you’re a fake." (See the video clip.)

Will he keep opinion to himself?

Later in the briefing, Fauci was asked if he will tell the public once Trump makes a reopening announcement whether the president listened to the recommendations from him and Birx.

“I’ll have to think about that,” Fauci said. He also said that he’s confident the president will defer to public health experts’ guidance.

Janison: Not-so-harmless fantasy

In his 1987 book "Art of the Deal," Trump declared for all to hear: “I play to people’s fantasies. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration, a very effective form of promotion.”

History has proved his hyperbole less than truthful and his exaggerations not so innocent, writes Newsday's Dan Janison. Nobody back in the day could have known Trump would ever get to "play to people's fantasies" during a national calamity with a captive audience.

People would love to fantasize that they elected a president so insightful that he knows better than the generals in battle and better than the doctors in a pandemic. Neither notion has panned out, and it's unlikely the dates he's floated for a return to normal will either.

The greatest collective fantasy of all is one that Trump lets some of his media allies and shills evoke — that death tolls are inflated, that lockdowns are an overreaction and that the whole calamity is still somehow, in some way, a political hoax. If only.

Bernie: I'm with Joe

Sen. Bernie Sanders endorsed Joe Biden’s presidential campaign on Monday, encouraging his progressive supporters to rally behind the presumptive Democratic nominee.

Appearing together with the former vice president via video from their homes, Sanders said there’s “no great secret out there that you and I have our differences.” But Sanders said the greater priority for Democrats of all stripes should be to defeat Trump. (Watch the announcement.)

“We’ve got to make Trump a one-term president,” Sanders said. “I will do all that I can to make that happen.”

The ex-rivals announced the formation of six “task forces” drawn from both campaigns to seek policy agreements addressing health care, the economy, education, criminal justice, climate change and immigration.

A leading Sanders supporter, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Bronx), told The New York Times she will back Biden but added that the candidate needs to do more to get progressives like her behind him. "If Biden is only doing things he's comfortable with, then it's not enough," she told the Times.

Coronavirus-infected sailor dies

A sailor from the USS Theodore Roosevelt died Monday of coronavirus complications, 11 days after the captain of the disease-infected aircraft carrier was fired. His letter to superiors, pressing his concern that the Navy wasn't doing enough to safeguard his crew, was leaked to a newspaper.

Among the Roosevelt's crew of approximately 4,860, there were 585 who tested positive as of Monday. Over the weekend, four additional Roosevelt crew members were admitted to the hospital, the Navy said.

The Pentagon has not ruled out the possibility that Capt. Brett Crozier, who also is recuperating from COVID-19, could be reinstated as the ship's commander, Politico reports. Former acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly resigned following an uproar for firing Crozier and then telling the crew that the captain was “too naive or too stupid” to lead them.

More news on coronavirus

The coronavirus death toll in New York State has surpassed 10,000 even as Cuomo declared Monday that “the worst is over” with the pandemic's spread in the state.

See a roundup of the latest pandemic news from Long Island and beyond by Newsday's reporting staff, written by Bart Jones.

For a full list of Newsday's coronavirus stories, click here.

What else is happening:

• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Monday they won’t agree to the Trump administration’s insistence on more money for small-business loans without also getting more funds for hospitals, state and local governments and food stamp recipients.
• On a CBS "60 Minutes" interview rejecting criticism that the Trump administration was unprepared for a pandemic, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro cried double standard. "Show me episodes during the Obama and Bush administrations that said the global pandemic was coming, and then you will have some credence in attacking the Trump administration,” he demanded. The program did run such episodes in 2009 and 2005. (Watch the video.)
• The Trump administration wants to delay deadlines for the 2020 census because of the pandemic, according to Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-Manhattan), chairwoman of the House oversight committee. Such a move, if approved, would push back timetables for releasing data used to draw congressional and legislative districts.
• Democrats claimed victory Monday in a Wisconsin Supreme Court election, which Republicans backed by Trump insisted on holding last week despite the coronavirus pandemic. Dane County Judge Jill Karofsky, a liberal, defeated conservative incumbent Justice Daniel Kelly, who was endorsed by Trump.
• Biden leads Trump by an average of 6 points in nationwide live-interview polls of registered voters, but his lead in battleground states is narrower and perilous, according to a New York Times analysis.
• In an unprecedented move because of the pandemic, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear major cases on Trump's financial documents, religious freedom and the Electoral College by phone next month and make oral arguments available for live audio broadcast.