Trump's feel-good crisis response isn't catching on

How the debugging is going

In his first full day in charge of President Donald Trump's response to the coronavirus crisis, Vice President Mike Pence on Thursday tried to project calm, according to The Associated Press. Unfortunately, the vibe wasn't contagious.

The Dow suffered its worst one-day drop yet over worsening worldwide economic fears as COVID-19 coronavirus cases continue to spread globally. Facing a fierce political blowback, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, a former Big Pharma executive, did an about-face from his congressional testimony a day earlier that he couldn't promise that a vaccine, when developed, would be affordable for all Americans.

After days of contradictory messaging, the White House tried to clamp down, directing government health officials and scientists to coordinate all statements and public appearances with Pence's office. Trump himself went Twitter-silent Thursday on the coronavirus until a midevening post attacking CNN's coverage. At a White House event, the president insisted his Wednesday news conference had a "calming" effect and blamed the news media and Democrats for the free fall on Wall Street.

Pence, convening a coronavirus task force, named a seasoned medical professional, Dr. Deborah Birx, as his chief adviser on the response and said Trump had “tasked us to take every step necessary to protect the health of the American people.” Birx is an Obama administration holdover who has served as the State Department's global AIDS coordinator since 2014.

The coronavirus threat is forcing Trump to rely on members of the government's scientific bureaucracy he often has maligned, ignored and jettisoned, writes The Washington Post. His credibility has been undermined by his penchant for hyperbole and falsehoods. His Wednesday comment — that a spread of coronavirus in the U.S. wasn't "inevitable" — was out of sync with the message of health officials standing next to him.

Ron Klain, who led the Obama administration’s response to the Ebola outbreak in 2014 and is now an adviser to Joe Biden’s campaign, told the Post that a challenge for Trump in managing this crisis is his “desire to happy-talk away every problem.”

By downplaying coronavirus concerns, Klain said, Trump may be “trying to pump the stock market, but the virus is not going to be persuaded by Trump’s tweets. He needs to communicate straightforwardly with the American people what’s happening.”

Skepticism on Pence

As he named Pence to head the coronavirus fight, Trump pointed to his experience as governor of Indiana. So are critics of his record on public health who say he's wrong for the job.

In 2015, with the state suffering its worst HIV outbreak because of prescription-painkiller abusers, Pence resisted a CDC recommendation for a needle-exchange program. Two months after outbreak began, after 75 people were confirmed to be HIV-positive, Pence caved.

“It was disappointing that it took so much effort to bring the governor on board,” state Rep. Ed Clere, a fellow Republican, said at the time. Researchers at Yale University found that faster action could have prevented the epidemic.

Pence also downplayed the risk of smoking as late as 2000. In an article on his congressional campaign website, Pence bemoaned the "hysteria" behind anti-tobacco legislation and declared, “Smoking does not kill."

Janison: Incurable quackery?

Trump had one simple job, writes Newsday's Dan Janison — to tell people what is known about the coronavirus and to explain how his administration was responding. But he fell back on sideshows, blaming the news media for fanning fear and offering unsupported medical predictions.

There were warmups for these assurances — predictions the virus will go away with warmer weather in April and praising China, which ignored the outbreak until it became a disaster, as "getting it more and more under control."

But there's no surprise when Trump is an outlier on matters of science. For years, he entertained debunked theories about vaccines generally and blasted climate change as a Chinese "hoax." He spreads fables of wind generators causing cancer, and he childishly altered a weather map to conform to his false prediction about a hurricane last fall.

Being prepared

Since the coronavirus outbreak worsened, Democrats including Biden and Mike Bloomberg have said Trump cut the budgets of the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. Not true, found an Associated Press fact-check.

Trump sought the cuts, but Congress refused to go along with him and instead increased funding. However, Trump has eliminated critical positions for responding to global pandemics, and his 2021 budget proposal tries again to cut CDC money by almost 16%, according to The Washington Post.

Trump was still defending that idea during his news conference Wednesday. "I'm a business person," he said. "I don't like having thousands of people around when you don't need them ... We can get ’em back really quickly."

Trump initially tried to lowball emergency funding for the coronavirus response at $2.5 billion, but both Republicans and Democrats in Congress want more. Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) and his House counterpart, Rep. Nita Lowey (D-Harrison), are negotiating the package. Shelby predicted it will exceed $4 billion, telling reporters: "We want to make sure, if this stuff really spreads, that we're doing our job."

Stopping Sanders at all costs?

Democratic establishment leaders understand the peril of damage inside the party if Bernie Sanders comes to the July convention with the most delegates but is denied the nomination, and it's a risk many are willing to take, The New York Times reported.

The Times interviewed 93 party officials — all of them superdelegates — and found overwhelming opposition to handing the Vermont senator the nomination if he fell short of a majority. That would lead to a brokered convention.

Sanders and his supporters argue a plurality of delegates should be enough. Elizabeth Warren shot back at a CNN town hall Wednesday night that Sanders was contradicting his position from when he battled Hillary Clinton in 2016, "that it should not go to the person who had a plurality." For 2020, she added, "Bernie had a big hand in writing these rules."

A new poll Thursday bolstered Biden's hope of slowing Sanders' momentum in Saturday's South Carolina primary. The Monmouth University survey showed the former vice president with 36% to 16% for Sanders and 15% for Tom Steyer.

What else is happening:

• With so many Democratic candidates' ads touting ties to Barack Obama, 60% of Democratic voters believe — erroneously — that he has endorsed one of them, according to a Morning Consult poll. Bloomberg and Biden were the top beneficiaries of the mistaken perception. The former president hasn't endorsed anyone.
• Bloomberg's campaign has been wooing ex-candidate Andrew Yang for an endorsement and floated the possibility of making him a running mate, The Wall Street Journal reported. A senior Bloomberg aide later said Yang wasn't under serious consideration for the ticket.
• New York Mayor Bill de Blasio's presidential campaign was a bust, but he's found a new way to get back into the national political conversation: trashing predecessor Bloomberg as a surrogate and attack dog for Sanders, The New York Times writes. A former de Blasio press secretary, Karen Hinton, said de Blasio may be angling for a Cabinet post like secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
• Trump spent 45 minutes Thursday with the lead actors of a low-budget conservative play called "FBI Lovebirds: Undercovers," The Daily Beast reports. It's based on the text messages between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, both denounced by Trump as part of the FBI "Russia hoax" plot against him. "He loves it," said playwright Phelim McAleer.
• Trump and his attorney general, William Barr, appear to be at odds over legislation to renew the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was used in the Russia investigation, CNN reported. Barr wants to renew the act and make internal reforms. A Trump tweet indicates he sides with congressional allies seeking bigger changes.
• Hillary Clinton is launching a podcast in late spring, which could be a platform for commentary on the 2020 election, Politico reports.