President 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 party 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 Dr Anthony S. Fauci, whom the President and other hard-Right figures within the administration have subjected to caustic personal criticism.
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, Joseph R. Biden Jr, 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, said of the pandemic. He said Abbott, a Republican, directs his requests to Pence, with whom he speaks 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 Dr Fauci and Dr 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, Senator 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 Dr Fauci and urged Americans to follow guidelines from the CDC that Trump has ignored or dismissed. “The straight talk here that everyone needs to understand is: This is not going away until we get a vaccine,” McConnell said on Wednesday, contradicting Trump’s rosy predictions.
The result is a quiet but widening breach between Trump and leading figures in his party, as the virus burns through major political battlegrounds in the South and the West, like in the states of Arizona, Texas and Georgia.
Amid mounting alarm in a huge portion of the country, Trump has at times appeared to inhabit a different universe, incorrectly predicting the outbreak would quickly dissipate and falsely claiming the spread of the virus was simply a function of increased testing.
The emerging rifts in Trump’s party have been slow to develop, but they have rapidly deepened since a new surge in coronavirus cases began to sweep the country last month.
In June, the governor of Utah, Gary Herbert, a Republican, joined other governors on a conference call with Pence and urged the administration to do more to combat a sense of “complacency” about the virus. Herbert said it would help states like his own if Trump were to encourage mask-wearing on a national scale.
New York Times News Service
