President Trump’s Wednesday White House coronavirus briefing contained the usual amount of blame-casting, jabs at the media and gripes at Trump’s political opponents. But there was also some news. Here’s what you need to know from that briefing.
On Tuesday, Washington Post opinion columnist Josh Rogin reported that the State Department was very concerned about a Wuhan lab’s safety protocols as it studied coronaviruses in bats. Rogin said diplomats wrote cables in early 2018 warning that “the lab’s work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.”
Roberts asked Trump about all this on Wednesday, and Trump didn’t rule it out, though he tried not to comment on it.
“I don’t want to say that, John, but I will tell you more and more, we’re hearing the story,” he said, without elaborating on what that story is. “We are doing a very thorough examination of this horrible situation.” He declined to say whether he discussed the lab with China’s president.
2. Trump will announce new guidelines to reopen the economy Thursday
“They’ll be safe; they’ll be strong,” he said.
Trump started out this week saying in a briefing he had “absolute” authority to open the economy, which he wants to do by May 1. He backed off that claim by Tuesday, after taking criticism for flouting the Constitution, instead saying he would essentially advise governors on how to open their economies.
He says some of those guidelines could be coming in a news conference Thursday. As he said this, he also indicated the United States may have reached its peak of cases, which is more hopeful language than his own medical experts are willing to use.
3. Trump is threatening to force the Senate out of session to make recess appointments related to coronavirus
The Constitution says he can technically do that in some situations, but no president has ever done it.
Here’s the way appointments typically work: The president nominates people to serve in the administration and on federal courts. The Senate denies or approves them. The Senate can approve Trump’s picks with a majority vote, which Republicans have done in the vast majority of situations (with a few notable exceptions). What Trump expressed frustration about on Wednesday was that Democrats have lengthened the clock on many of his nominees, so it takes longer to get them approved.
The president can skip over the whole process by making appointments when the Senate is in recess. (Though it’s controversial.) The Senate is currently in what’s called a pro forma session, meaning it’s in session but doesn’t do business. Trump told senators to recess so he can appoint people he says are needed for the coronavirus response to the federal government. If they don’t, he threatened to force them out of session, which could prompt a major showdown.
“We need people for this crisis, and I don’t want to wait,” he said. Here’s more on how this would work and the responses to Trump’s threat.
4. Trump indicates he didn’t know about having his name on the stimulus check
The Post’s Lisa Rein reported Tuesday that the economic relief checks that get mailed to people without direct deposit accounts will bear the name “Donald J. Trump,” which concerned some IRS employees as being overtly partisan and which some officials said could delay mailing of the checks by several days.
Trump didn’t deny he knew about the plan, but he also didn’t take ownership of it. “I don’t know too much about it, but I understand my name is there,” he said, adding he didn’t think it would delay the checks. “I’m sure people will be very happy to get a big, fat, beautiful check, and my name is on it.”
Rein reports Trump asked the treasury secretary whether he himself could sign the checks. (He can’t.)
5. Trump repeats false statement that he took over a ‘bare’ medical stockpile
He says this near daily now, blaming the Obama administration for the shortage of masks and other protective equipment and lifesaving ventilators in the federal stockpile.
“The shelves are not bare,” he said, speaking of grocery store shelves, “like the shelves that I inherited when we took over the stockpile, the medical stockpile, where the shelves were bare, the cupboard was bare.”
He does the same thing with testing kits, falsely saying he “inherited” a false test. His own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made the faulty coronavirus test.
And the federal stockpile, created in the 1990s for emergencies like a terrorist attack, has been ill funded and not well attended to throughout several administrations. But that includes his. And as alarm bells went off in the intelligence community and among some in his own administration about the novel coronavirus, Trump did not seek to build up the stockpile. More than 2,000 ventilators are broken because the government let their contract for maintenance lapse, the New York Times reports.
On April 8, the Associated Press reported that the stockpile delivered to hospitals its last remaining masks and protective equipment.
6. The Trump administration insists there is enough food for Americans
The shortages in American grocery stores aren’t really shortages, Agricultural Secretary Sonny Perdue said at the briefing. He said it’s a reflection of people buying up lots of food in cities and of farmers having to readjust from supplying schools to grocery stores.
The assurance was, well, reassuring. But it was also a surreal moment to hear a Cabinet secretary tell the American people not to worry about food.
“In the United States, we have plenty of food for all of our citizens. I want to be clear, the bare store shelves that you may see in some cities in the country are a demand issue, not a supply issue,” he said.
Another concern is that virus outbreaks at meat plants, like the one this past weekend that forced a large pork processing plant to shut down, may affect the food supply.
