Trump Touts Covid Response as Cases Surge to New Highs

By Yuval Rosenberg

Trump Touts Covid Response as Cases Surge to New Highs

President Donald Trump on Friday broke a week-long public
silence, appearing in the White House Rose Garden to tout his
administration’s pandemic response even as the coronavirus
rages across the country, with a record
153,000 new cases reported on Thursday, the
seventh new high in nine days.

Trump again falsely claimed that the surge in virus cases is the
result of increased testing and he highlighted the progress of
Operation Warp Speed, the administration’s vaccine development
program, and the strength of the economy.

"The past nine months, my administration has initiated the
single greatest mobilization in U.S. history, pioneering,
developing and manufacturing therapies and vaccines in record
time," he said, adding that millions of doses of vaccine "will soon
be going out the door" and that a vaccine could be widely available
as early as April.

Trump took credit for Pfizer’s announcement this week that
its vaccine candidate was more than 90% effective, claiming that
the pharmaceutical giant had been part of Operation Warp Speed,
despite its
claims otherwise, because his administration in
July had entered into a $1.95 billion deal to buy 100 million doses
of a vaccine developed by the company.

Trump did not concede his election loss, but he came close to
acknowledging that he won’t be president much longer while saying
that his administration would not enter another lockdown: "This
administration will not be going to a lockdown. Hopefully, the, uh
— whatever happens in the future, who knows which administration it
will be, I guess time will tell, but I can tell you this
administration will not go to a lockdown."

Trump took no questions from reporters.

‘Publicly disengaged’: Trump’s speech followed an unusual
days-long stretch during which the president remained largely out
of sight and reportedly showed "little evidence of -- or interest
in -- governing in the wake of the election," as
ABC News put it.

Trump had made an appearance at Arlington National Cemetery on
Wednesday to honor veterans, but he hadn’t spoken publicly or taken
questions since last Thursday, when he told reporters that the
election was being stolen from him. He has been active on Twitter,
but his tweets have been focused on
unsubstantiated claims of election fraud.

"President Donald Trump has publicly disengaged from the battle
against the coronavirus at a moment when the disease is tearing
across the United States at an alarming pace," the
Associated Press reported Friday, adding that
aides say the president has shown little interest in the pandemic
as it worsens — even as numerous officials in the White House and
his reelection campaign have tested positive for the virus over the
last couple of weeks.


More than 130 Secret Service officers have
reportedly been ordered to isolate or quarantine because they were
infected or came in close contact with co-workers who had the
virus, with the outbreak believed to be linked in part to Trump
rallies over the final weeks of the campaign.

"The situation now is akin to a fire chief assuring people that
the best approach to fires breaking out in an apartment complex is
to let the fires burn themselves out while he provides them with
fire extinguishers. And then not providing the fire extinguishers.
And then spending most of his time tweeting about how he won the
vote for best fire chief," The Washington Post’s Philip Bump

writes. "It’s a fierce competition, but this may
define Trump’s legacy. He will be remembered as the president who
faced a deadly crisis and decided to look away."

The country can’t wait: Trump’s silence had drawn
criticism from public health experts and others worried that his
lack of action and unwillingness to coordinate with President-elect
Joe Biden’s transition team would hinder efforts to curb the spread
of the virus and prepare for eventual distribution of a
vaccine.

"It’s a big problem," Dr. Abraar Karan, a global health
specialist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical
School, told the AP. "The transition is not going to happen until
January, and we are in a complete crisis right now. We already know
where this is headed. ... It’s not good enough to say we’re going
to wait until the next president to address this."

What Trump could do: Bloomberg’s Josh Wingrove and Emma
Court provide a number of suggestions from health experts. "The
president could help by asking Americans directly to wear masks,
encouraging Republican governors to do more to slow the spread,
publicly backing health officials or even directing his staff to
jointly coordinate with President-elect Joe Biden’s transition
team, to ensure a smooth hand-off," they
write. "Trump has instead been absent. He’s
discouraged masks and social distancing and is blocking the start
of Biden’s transition while refusing to concede defeat, compounding
the federal inaction."

The bottom line: The vaccine
development timeline truly is encouraging and remarkable, with the
White House saying that two vaccines may be authorized for
emergency use by the end of the year. But the pandemic picture
stands to grow much worse by then, let alone a time when vaccines
are widely available. "I fear the next three months ahead could be
the worst we’ve faced during the pandemic," Lawrence Gostin, a
public health expert at Georgetown University’s law school, told
the Associated Press. "America is like a ship at storm, and the
captain has decided to go play golf."

Pelosi Declares ‘Red Alert’ on Stimulus

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) on Friday called for a renewal
of negotiations on the stalled Covid-19 relief bill, saying that
Congress must act now as the virus surges again around the
country.

"Our focus in the lame duck continues to be on Covid relief --
this is a red alert," Pelosi said at a press conference. "I urge
Republicans to acknowledge the crisis and come to the table to work
on Covid relief."

No talks are currently scheduled, however, and as we told you

yesterday, there is considerable doubt that Pelosi
and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) can bridge the
more than $1 trillion gap between Democratic and Republican
proposals for the relief bill before President-elect Joe Biden
takes office.

Looking for federal help: State and
local officials are hesitating to take aggressive steps to halt the
spread of the virus, due in part to a lack of fiscal support, the
Associated Press
reported Friday. "I think that governors and
mayors are, again, are in a really tough spot," Dr. Megan Ranney,
an emergency physician at Brown University, told the AP. "The
American population is emotionally and economically exhausted. I
think that there are some minimum things that governors and mayors
could and should be doing right now. But the trouble is, without
support from the federal government, it becomes very difficult to
do these things."

Biden Team Embraces a Trump Tax Break

President-elect Joe Biden plans to undo some of President
Trump’s tax cuts by raising rates on businesses and high-income
households, but Biden’s team has reportedly embraced one part of
the 2017 Republican tax overhaul: special treatment for investments
in federally defined "opportunity zones."

The idea of using tax breaks to encourage investment in
distressed areas has long been popular in both parties. According
to
Bloomberg’s Noah Buhayar and Lydia O'Neal, one of
Biden’s top advisers wrote a paper that contributed to their
creation, while Vice President-elect Kamala Harris has cited them
as a means to foster entrepreneurship.

"There are a lot of people in his universe who care about this,"
former Obama administration official Steve Glickman, who is
involved in opportunity zone investing, told Bloomberg. "They think
it’s a good idea."

That doesn’t mean, however, that the Biden administration
doesn’t want to make changes in the program. The Trump
administration has provided little data about how the program is
operating, and some critics have charged that the zones are being
used to give tax breaks to developers in places that don’t need
help, such as Brooklyn and the Boston waterfront. Biden’s platform
calls for more transparency in the program and for the U.S.
Treasury to review projects to assure the public is benefiting.

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