US governors have accused Donald Trump of making “delusional” and “dangerous” statements amid mounting tensions between the president and state leaders over coronavirus testing and pressure to roll back stay-at-home measures.
The United States has by far the world’s largest number of confirmed coronavirus cases, with more than 730,000 infections and over 39,600 deaths.
Many state leaders have said they cannot embark on Trump’s recommended three-phrase programme to ease stay-at-home restrictions without a robust and widespread system of testing in place.
Researchers at Harvard University have suggested the US should conduct more than three times the number of coronavirus tests it is currently administering over the course of the next month, the New York Times reported.
Democratic governor Ralph Northam of Virginia told CNN on Sunday that claims by Trump and Vice-President Mike Pence that states have plenty of tests were “just delusional”.
“We have been fighting for testing,” he said on CNN’s State of the Union. “We don’t even have enough swabs, believe it or not. For the national level to say that we have what we need, and really to have no guidance to the state levels, is just irresponsible, because we’re not there yet.”
"That's just delusional, to be making statements like that," Virginia Gov. Northam says about President Trump's claim that states have enough tests to reopen. "To have no guidance to the state levels is just irresponsible because we're not there yet" #CNNSOTU pic.twitter.com/wzowhOAEUj
— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) April 19, 2020
Maryland, Virginia and Washington DC are still seeing increasing cases even as the center of the US outbreak, New York, has started to see some declines. Boston and Chicago are also emerging hot spots with recent surges in cases and deaths.
“The administration I think is trying to ramp up testing, they are doing some things with respect to private labs,” said Republican governor Larry Hogan of Maryland during a CNN interview. “But to try to push this off, to say the governors have plenty of testing and they should just get to work on testing, somehow we aren’t doing our jobs, is just absolutely false.”
Several states, including Ohio, Texas and Florida, have said they aim to reopen parts of their economies, perhaps by 1 May or even sooner, but appeared to be staying cautious.
The White House guidelines released late last week on reopening the economy recommend a state record 14 days of declining case numbers before gradually lifting restrictions. Yet in a series of tweets from Trump on Friday, the president called for the “liberation” of Minnesota, Michigan and Virginia, Democratic-led states with strict stay-at-home orders, and appeared to be the catalyst for protests backed by rightwing groups in several places, including Texas, Maryland and Ohio.
In his tweet on Friday the president claimed without evidence that Virginia citizens’ second amendment rights were “under siege” after Northam signed into law tighter firearms restrictions a week earlier.
In Austin, the Texas state capital, protesters called on Trump to fire Dr Anthony Fauci, the leading US expert on infectious diseases, from his task force tackling the pandemic crisis.
Washington governor Jay Inslee, a Democrat who on Friday blasted Trump’s tweets as “unhinged rantings”, and one of the most vocal critics of the president, reinforced his position on Sunday.
“I don’t know any other way to characterize it,” Inslee told host George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week. “To have an American president encourage people to violate the law, I can’t remember any time during my time in America where we have seen such a thing. And it is dangerous because it can inspire people to ignore things that actually can save their lives.
“It is doubly frustrating to us governors because this is such a schizophrenia. The president is basically asking people, ‘Please ignore Dr Fauci and Dr Birx [White House taskforce medical advisers], please ignore my own guidelines that I set forth,’ because those guidelines made very clear… that you cannot open up Michigan today, or Virginia, under those guidelines. You need to see a decline in the infections and fatalities. And that simply has not happened yet.”
Pence insisted in an interview aired on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday that the country had “sufficient capacity” for any state to go to the phase one level.
But Hogan and others said the issue was not as straightforward as Pence presented it.
“Every governor in America has been pushing and fighting and clawing to get more tests, not only from the federal government, but from every private lab in America and from all across the world. It’s not accurate to say there’s plenty of testing out there, and the governors should just get it done.”
Hogan said he was sympathetic to the protesters. “I’m frustrated also,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s helpful to encourage demonstrations. To encourage people to go protest the plan that you just made recommendations on, it just doesn’t make any sense. We’re sending completely conflicting messages out to the governors and to the people, as if we should ignore federal policy and federal recommendations.”
Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan, where some of the earliest protests took place last week, once again strongly defended strict lockdown restrictions in her state, the 10th largest by population but third highest in the nation in terms of Covid-19 deaths.
“My stay-home order is one of the nation’s more conservative but the fact of the matter is it’s working. We are seeing the curve start to flatten and that means we’re saving lives,” she said.
“[But] I can tell you, we could double or even triple the number of tests if we had the swabs and reagents. That’s precisely why it would really be incredibly helpful if the federal government would use the Defense Production Act to start making these swabs and reagents, so we can improve testing.”