Iran Press/ America: President Donald Trump’s failure to contain the coronavirus outbreak and his refusal to promote clear public-health guidelines have left many senior Republicans despairing that he will ever play a constructive role in addressing the crisis, with some concluding they must work around Trump and ignore or even contradict his pronouncements.
In recent days, some of the most prominent figures in the GOP outside the White House have broken with Trump over issues like the value of wearing a mask in public and heeding the advice of health experts like Anthony Fauci, who the president and other hard-right figures within the administration have subjected to caustic personal criticism, The New York Times reported.
They appear to be spurred by several overlapping forces, including deteriorating conditions in their own states, Trump’s seeming indifference to the problem, and the approach of a presidential election in which Trump is badly lagging his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, in the polls.
Once-reticent Republican governors are now issuing orders on mask-wearing and business restrictions that run counter to Trump’s demands. Some of those governors have been holding late-night phone calls among themselves to trade ideas and grievances; they have sought out partners in the administration other than the president, including Vice President Mike Pence, who, despite echoing Trump in public, is seen by governors as far more attentive to the continuing disaster.
“The president got bored with it,” David Carney, an adviser to the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, a Republican, said of the pandemic. He noted that Abbott directs his requests to Pence, with whom he speaks two to three times a week.
A handful of Republican lawmakers in the Senate have privately pressed the administration to bring back health briefings led by figures like Fauci and Deborah Birx, who regularly updated the public during the spring until Trump upstaged them with his own briefing-room monologues. And in his home state of Kentucky last week, Sen. Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, broke with Trump on nearly every major issue related to the virus.
McConnell stressed the importance of mask-wearing, expressed “total” confidence in Fauci, and urged Americans to follow guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that Trump has ignored or dismissed.
The US state of Florida has reported over 12,000 new cases of coronavirus, on the fifth day in a row the state has announced over 10,000 new infections - even as United States President Donald Trump has pledged that the virus is coming under control.
The virus has claimed over 140,000 lives in the US since the pandemic started, and Florida, California, Texas, and other southern and western states have recently been shattering records daily. Despite record levels of new cases nationwide, the Trump administration is pushing for schools to reopen in a few weeks and resisting a federal mandate to wear masks in public.
104/214
Read More:
Donald Trump, psychologically damaged: His niece
Despite Trump's insistence, most Americans oppose reopening schools
Confirmed US coronavirus cases top 3.5 million
