Mr. Trump’s tweet cast doubt on his confidence in the path to fighting the virus that he so reluctantly approved. For two months he largely dismissed the warnings that the virus would reach American shores, for fear of causing economic disruption, predicting that cases would go down from a handful to “zero” in a few days. Only when the disruption came anyway, in the form of a historic stock market sell-off, was he convinced to act.
But there could be consequences for ending the measures too quickly. The recent rise of cases in Hong Kong, after there had been an easing of the spread of the virus, is something of an object lesson about how ending strict measures too soon can have dangerous consequences.
In a tweet on Monday morning, Thomas Bossert, the former homeland security adviser who for weeks has been vocal about the need for the U.S. government to take stricter measures, said, “Sadly, the numbers now suggest the U.S. is poised to take the lead in #coronavirus cases. It’s reasonable to plan for the US to top the list of countries with the most cases in approximately 1 week. This does NOT make social intervention futile. It makes it imperative!”
Whatever the president chooses to do, there will be businesses still fearful to reopen — and employees fearful of going to work — as new cases of people infected with the virus are still being diagnosed by the thousands each day. And the president is facing potential pushback from the public health experts in his administration.
After being slow to publicly react to the spread of the virus, the Trump administration swung in the other direction at the end of February, entrusting the health experts whose counsel had not been heeded in the preceding weeks and letting them help set the policies that hundreds of millions of people would be urged to follow.
But Mr. Trump has become frustrated with Dr. Fauci’s blunt approach at the briefing lectern, which often contradicts things the president has just said, according to two people familiar with the dynamic. Mr. Trump knows that Dr. Fauci is seen as credible with a large swath of the public and with journalists, and so he has given him more leeway to contradict him than he has other officials. But the president has also resisted portraying the virus as an existential threat in a way that the public health experts have.
In an interview with Science Magazine that was posted online on Sunday evening, Dr. Fauci responded to a question about how he had managed not to get fired by saying that, to Mr. Trump’s “credit, even though we disagree on some things, he listens.” “He goes his own way,” Dr. Fauci continued. “He has his own style. But on substantive issues, he does listen to what I say.” But he also said there was a limit to what he could do when Mr. Trump said things that were not true during those briefings.
“I can’t jump in front of the microphone and push him down,” Mr. Fauci said of Mr. Trump’s erroneous statements. “OK, he said it. Let’s try and get it corrected for the next time.” In an interview with Fox Business Network, the Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, stressed that the U.S. economy was still functioning. “I’ve seen a bunch of fake news over the last couple of days about a complete shut down of the economy,” he said. “The president has not made that decision.”
But the president’s interest in potentially easing some of the social behavior guidelines met with pushback from one of his close allies, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina. “President Trump’s best decision was stopping travel from China early on,” Mr. Graham tweeted on Monday. “I hope we will not undercut that decision by suggesting we back off aggressive containment policies within the United States.”
David McIntosh, the president of the anti-tax Club for Growth, suggested Friday that the damage to the economy was severe. “We need to act to contain the virus, but at the same time more people would be hurt and have terrible health and life consequences if they don’t reopen the economy,” Mr. McIntosh said. “They have to put an end to the social distancing sometime soon to restore economic activity.”
