Still hard to see Trump making tough choices in U.S. coronavirus crisis

Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) chaired a House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health hearing Thursday on scientific integrity in the coronavirus response. Credit: Pool / Getty Images / Greg Nash
President Donald Trump would like everyone to think he is at the helm when signaling support for a quick reopening of schools and businesses. He also verbally gratifies those of his fans who protest local emergency rules in battleground states such as Michigan, where small demonstrations targeting Democrats draw national attention.
Notice, however, that Trump has not directly disputed the cautions or proposed guidelines of medical experts on his coronavirus task force. Nor did he disband the advisory panel as he once had planned.
Presidential son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner was asked by Time magazine the other day about Trump's plans for the economy. Kushner said: “There’s risk in anything, but the President carries the burden of the 30 million Americans who have lost their jobs due to this historic effort to save lives.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is "incredibly knowledgeable," Kushner said. But “you have a lot of policymakers like the President or the governors who were elected by the people in their states and in their country to take the input of the experts and professionals, and then make decisions weighing a lot of different factors."
Whatever that spiel meant, it qualified as neither a position nor a plan.
Naturally, Americans remain impatient to resume their lives. Detailed questions remain as to how to go about it.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) strangely told Fauci at a Senate hearing Wednesday that he isn't "the end-all. I don’t think you’re the only person that gets to make the [reopening] decision." Paul didn't point to anyone who had said otherwise. By only hinting at an allegation, though, Paul's words kept the onus off the president's actual decision-making. It sounded like a dog-whistle message to fringe activists who try for some reason to caricature Fauci as a scientist run amok.
Only a month ago, Trump said falsely the decision will be his own as to when “to open up the states." Suddenly he flip-flopped and seemed to defer to the governors. Soon, Trump criticized Georgia's Republican Gov. Brian Kemp for allowing gyms, barber shops, hair salons, tattoo parlors and bowling alleys to reopen. Trump's remarks, after the fact, had zero practical impact. As of 1 p.m. Thursday, Georgia reported 1,527 coronavirus deaths, up from 899 at the start of the reopening three weeks ago.
Congress has a proper role in assessing the performance of Trump's federal agencies. The testimony Thursday by Dr. Rick Bright created a new stir on that front. The vaccine expert-turned-whistleblower, demoted last month by Trump's White House, said the Department of Health and Human Services “did not respond” when he first raised concerns about shortages of medical equipment such as N95 masks and testing supplies.
“From that moment, I knew that we were going to have a crisis for our health care workers because we were not taking action. We were already behind the ball," Bright told a House subcommittee. He said that even now, "we don’t have a single point of leadership right now for this response, and we don’t have a master plan for this response."
Trump and his administration officials responded by calling Bright a malcontent. HHS Secretary Alex Azar, standing beside Trump on the White House lawn, said: “Everything he is complaining about was achieved. Everything he talked about was done." That won't be the end of the argument.