WASHINGTON — Even for a White Home that always seeks consultants just for affirmation of President Trump’s instincts, his acknowledgment on Tuesday
WASHINGTON — Even for a White Home that always seeks consultants just for affirmation of President Trump’s instincts, his acknowledgment on Tuesday that the coronavirus process power would exit of enterprise round Memorial Day appeared like dismantling the wheelhouse whereas the ship was nonetheless in a raging storm.
Then when the president reversed himself on Wednesday, he emphasised that he was retaining the duty power going as a result of he had found that it was “common,” not as a result of he wanted its coverage recommendation. Its membership may change, he mentioned, presumably to focus extra consideration on his clear precedence of getting the nation again to work.
All of which raised a query: Does it matter whether or not the coronavirus process power lives or dies?
In strange occasions in Washington, it will matter quite a bit. It’s hardly uncommon for presidents to create new buildings to navigate a disaster, gathering consultants who can distill the work of departments and intelligence companies and drive the execution of advanced plans throughout a sprawling federal paperwork.
It’s why Harry S. Truman created the Nationwide Safety Council to navigate Chilly Conflict realities in 1947, and why Dwight D. Eisenhower moved the science adviser into the White Home a decade later to take care of the area race.
It’s why John F. Kennedy met in secret with a committee of consultants throughout the outset of the Cuban missile disaster to determine whether or not conflict or diplomacy was the best path.
However the coronavirus process power, led by Vice President Mike Pence, clearly had a unique position.
It had a psychological resonance with a scared public that wishes to see and listen to from medical consultants after weeks of Mr. Trump’s taking part in down the effect of the virus. In the end, it was that public-facing role, rather than the expertise the task force gathered or the recommendations it issued to the states, that led Mr. Trump to flip-flop.
“I thought we could wind it down sooner,” the president told reporters on Wednesday. “But I had no idea how popular the task force is until actually yesterday when I started talking about winding down. It is appreciated by the public.”
In Mr. Trump’s world, advisory committees and lawyers are usually there to provide a way for him to put his instincts into operation. So it appears with the coronavirus task force, which operates alongside other groups that have related responsibilities.
One is run by Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, to find scarce supplies and now to manage the race for a vaccine. Another is operated inside the domestic policy council. Members of the coronavirus task force wondered whether their authority was being undercut even while it was still fully functioning.
And yet, they continued meeting daily until recently.
“The question any historian would ask of Donald Trump’s leadership here is what was the role of the experts,” said the presidential historian Michael Beschloss. “How much did he actually listen to them, and how much was it simply an effort to show the public that the president was at work on the problem?”
When Mr. Pence took over the task force, Mr. Trump had finally accepted that the spread of the virus had created a political challenge, advisers said. Yet it was not until three weeks later that he fully acknowledged there was a growing public health problem.
On March 10, a day before an Oval Office address that was filled with errors, the president talked to aides about scheduling a rally in Florida for two weeks later. It never happened.
On March 16, Mr. Trump announced new guidelines for social distancing, then publicly questioned whether they were a good idea for another two weeks before seeing television stories about more than a dozen deaths in one day at Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens, where he grew up.
By the time Dr. Anthony S. Fauci and Dr. Deborah L. Birx came to him with projections of up to 2.2 million deaths if more were not done, the president had already made up his mind that closures were necessary — though, according to advisers, he imagined a month would suffice.
The height of the task force’s power — and perhaps the beginning of its downfall — can be traced to mid-April. That is when Dr. Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, and Dr. Birx, who is coordinating the task force’s day-to-day operations, developed step-by-step guidance for states that were considering lifting their lockdowns.
The president participated in the rollout. Then he began to undercut it, never calling out governors who announced reopenings before meeting the White House’s standards. He sided instead with protesters looking to open even sooner.
Mr. Trump, of course, has never run an ordinary presidency, and enjoys bypassing bureaucracies and undercutting experts. But there is a reason past presidents relied on new structures to manage new, terrifying realities.
The science office, for example, was created after the Soviets launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, driving home the need for the United States to rise to a national security, educational and technological challenge. (Mr. Trump waited more than a year and a half into his presidency to appoint a science adviser.)
But it was the Cuban missile crisis that underscored the importance of a group of experts that the president could rely on.
“Kennedy came to office thinking the National Security Council was slow, unimaginative and bureaucratic,” Mr. Beschloss said.
Then Kennedy stumbled into the Bay of Pigs — a sloppily run, failed effort to mount a coup in Cuba with a bunch of amateurs — “and one of his conclusions was that in dealing with the crisis he needed experts with long experience to advise him on whether policies to deal with a crisis would succeed or fail,” Mr. Beschloss said.
That is what led to Kennedy’s executive committee — known as Ex Comm — which was contentious, argumentative and, in the early days of the crisis, leaned toward military action that easily could have escalated into nuclear war. But over time, and with the arrival of new evidence, it developed a different approach, finding a way to steer clear of mutual annihilation.
These days, the evidence arriving on Mr. Trump’s desk shows that while new cases of the coronavirus are declining in the New York City area, they are rising in much of the rest of the country. Medical experts are saying that now is no time to depart from the guidelines issued by the task force only three weeks ago.
Mr. Trump does not want to hear it. But it turns out that he does want to retain the appearance of gathering the best and the brightest.
“I think the White House task force at this juncture is largely symbolic, but for a president that 50 percent of the country thinks lies chronically, it’s sort of reassuring to know that there are other medical professionals and lawmakers keeping their hand on the” tiller, said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian.
If nothing else, he said, it serves “to reassure a jittery public.”
David E. Sanger reported from Washington, and Maggie Haberman from New York.