White House points fingers as it plots coronavirus stimulus

The White House descended into a flurry of recriminations and meetings on Monday as staffers quarreled over how to control a deepening public health and economic crisis.

While President Donald Trump previewed a slate of fiscal stimulus options from the White House Monday night, other aides privately continued to debate the seriousness of the coronavirus. Officials, like Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, had been urging staff not to overreact, while other aides advocated dramatic measures, such as shutting down borders, stopping cruise ship travel and expanding travel restrictions.

Then there was the blame game.

One senior administration official blamed the national security staff for bungling the early coronavirus response. Other aides blamed the vice president’s office, which has taken the lead on the response. “The Office of the Vice President seems way in over their heads,” one White House official said, referring to the coordination and messaging. “They don’t know what they’re doing.”

Separately, some aides took issue with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield, who’d dutifully stood by Trump during his Friday visit to the Atlanta agency and commended the president for his “decisive leadership.” Trump, for his part, continued to denigrate the media and Democrats on Twitter for overhyping the coronavirus threat.

The finger pointing reflects some of the broader confusion and mixed messaging that health experts say hampered the Trump administration's early attempts to stanch the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. There are now over 500 coronavirus cases in the U.S., and the death toll hit 26 on Monday.

“What has been remarkable is that Trump has not had a global crisis like this during his presidency so far. This is his leadership moment and he has been ill-prepared for it,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian and professor of history at Rice University. “Instead, Trump wants to create an alternative lane of blame.”

The White House pushed back against the notion of any dissension over the administration's handling of the outbreak.

"This is just more efforts by the fake news to create panic among the American people and to speculate on palace intrigue," said White House spokesperson Judd Deere. "The president has been leading from the very beginning to protect the health and safety of the American people and that is his priority. The president has also been very clear that the vice president and the coronavirus task force are doing an incredible job leading the whole-of-government approaching in close coordination with the state and local leaders."

Trump's move to offset economic losses came after the stock market on Monday had its biggest drop since the 2008 global financial recession, triggering a rare halt on trading early in the day. The Dow finished the day down nearly eight percent or by 2,000 points, while Treasury yields hit a record low.

Far more worrisome to the White House was an early-morning plunge in oil prices.

Trump met with his economic advisers Monday afternoon to discuss options for fiscal stimulus. Possibilities considered included expanding paid sick leave, offering relief for small businesses and extending aid to sectors hurt by the coronavirus.

At a White House briefing late Monday, Trump said he would propose some of these options more formally on Tuesday, specifically mentioning a payroll tax cut, help for hourly wage earners who don’t have paid time off and loans for affected industries and small businesses. Trump also vowed to work closely with the airline, cruise ship and hospitality industries, which have seen a downturn in business in recent weeks.

"This was something that we were thrown into and we're going to handle it and we have been handling it very well," Trump said. "The main thing is that we're taking care of the American public, and we will be taking care of the American public."

Aides are also considering government relief to specific geographic regions the virus has hit hard, one of the many options they’ve been studying for the past 10 days, even as a multitude of key aides gave optimistic assessments of the economy to the public.

Mnuchin said on Monday night the president was committed to using any tool to ensure the health of the economy.

“This is not like the financial crisis where we don't know the end in sight," he said. "This is about providing proper tools and liquidity to get through the next few months."

Mnuchin and National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow plan to go to Capitol Hill on Tuesday to brief Senate Republicans on the various fiscal stimulus options. Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas told POLITICO on Monday that “it’s too early to know” if the U.S. economy needs this type of government help.

Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) called the economic challenges “just a matter of people hesitant to fly, and I’m not exactly sure how we legislate our way out of that problem.”

He added: “The best solution to the economic challenge is to hope that we get through the coronavirus quickly and the summer weather does make a difference. Though this may be the one virus where it won’t make a difference.”

Before the coronavirus-spurred economic downturn, Trump advisers and allies saw the state of economy as the president’s best argument for reelection. In a new poll from Quinnipiac University, 66 percent of voters called the U.S. economy excellent or good, down from 70 percent in mid-February. But 57 percent of voters also said the country was very or somewhat likely to fall into a recession in the next year, a figure that is unchanged since February.

In recent days, some of the most forceful calls for actions came from top former Trump officials who took to Twitter and TV to make their appeals.

“The No. 1 rule for me, if I were back in that building, would be to get people to stop looking backwards,” said Thomas Bossert, Trump’s former homeland security and counterterrorism adviser, during a Monday morning appearance on ABC’s "Good Morning America."

“This is a leadership opportunity for the president to paint for the American people what it is going to look like over the next couple of weeks, months, up to a year," he added.

Amid the economic slide, the White House will be getting a new internal leader, with Mark Meadows taking over as Trump’s chief of staff from Mick Mulvaney.

Over the weekend, Meadows participated in an administration call about the coronavirus response and spoke with individual senior staffers. He mostly listened and sought recommendations from top officials, according to two people briefed on the calls.

One senior administration aide said officials are now starting to receive good coronavirus data from South Korea and Italy, which gives them a better sense of which people are most at risk in the U.S.

Still, the coronavirus threatens to swamp the final months of Trump’s first term, as the administration deals with further outbreaks throughout the U.S., more economic uncertainty and the anxiety among Americans still unsure about the best means of prevention.

The crisis is a leadership test for Trump, a frequent underminer of the administration’s own messaging efforts and never one to grapple with health care specifics. Trump has instead focused his public remarks on insisting he deserves credit for taking early action to block people traveling to the U.S. from China — even as his administration lagged on ensuring the U.S. had enough capacity to test for the virus.

In comparison to his more mellow press conference Monday night, Trump started the day with a breezy attitude online and compared the coronavirus to the flu — all while bashing the Obama administration and the media.

“So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!,” Trump tweeted from Florida.

Dan Diamond, Ian Kullgren, Marianne Levine, Andrew Desiderio, Meridith McGraw and Daniel Lippman contributed to this report.