Birx pushes for a mask mandate as Major League Baseball faces a reckoning with the virus. It’s Tuesday, and this is your politics tip sheet. |
- President Trump’s national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, is the latest member of the administration to test positive for the coronavirus. The White House announced yesterday that O’Brien had “mild symptoms” and was working remotely. It said that there had been “no risk of exposure to the president or the vice president.”
- It has now been three weeks since the United States went through a day with fewer than 50,000 confirmed new coronavirus cases. Attempts to bring public life back online have tended to go sideways — just look at the Major League Baseball season, which started last week and is already on the rocks. The Miami Marlins postponed games scheduled for yesterday and today after at least 14 members of the team’s traveling party, including 12 players, tested positive for the virus.
- Still, Trump said yesterday that he wanted governors to hurry up and reopen their economies, despite the fact that cases are rising in most states. “A lot of the governors should be opening up states that they’re not opening, and we’ll see what happens with them,” the president said during a visit to a North Carolina biotechnology lab.
- It was a departure from the relatively cautious tone that Trump has recently adopted when discussing the virus, particularly in the news conferences he gave last week. And even as he pushed for states to proceed with reopening, he emphasized the importance of “maintaining social distance, maintaining rigorous hygiene” and wearing masks. After speaking to the news media, he put on a mask himself as he toured the lab.
- During a visit to Tennessee, where the virus is raging, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, said she thought everyone in the state should be required to wear a mask. “We need 100 percent of the counties, including the rural counties, to have these mandates,” Birx told reporters.
- Bill Lee, the state’s Republican governor, spoke immediately after Birx and declined to commit to issuing a statewide mandate. “We talked about statewide mandates, we also talked about alternative approaches,” he said, referring to a private conversation he’d had with Birx. More than 30 states have put in place some form of mask mandate.
- Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, announced yesterday that Republicans would seek to reduce the federal extension of unemployment benefits in the next stimulus bill to $200 a week. Back in March, Congress increased unemployment insurance payments by $600 a week; that provision is set to expire at the end of this week.
- Democrats have called for the extension to be continued in full until the economy is able to safely reopen.
- McConnell also sketched out the basics of the Republican proposal, which would include another round of $1,200 checks to Americans earning $75,000 or less per year, extra funding for the Paycheck Protection Program, liability protection for businesses that reopen during the pandemic and over $100 billion in education funding.
|
- An Army National Guard commander plans to tell the House today that peaceful protesters were “subjected to an unprovoked escalation and excessive use of force” when federal agents used tear gas and flash-bang grenades to clear them from Lafayette Square in Washington last month.
- The officer, Adam DeMarco, will testify today before the Natural Resources Committee. An Iraq war veteran, DeMarco was among the D.C. National Guardsmen stationed at Lafayette Square on June 1, when officers were ordered to disperse racial-justice protesters so Trump could walk from the White House to a photo op at St. John’s Church.
- “The events I witnessed at Lafayette Square on the evening of June 1 were deeply disturbing to me, and to fellow National Guardsmen,” DeMarco plans to say, according to a copy of his prepared testimony. “Having served in a combat zone, and understanding how to assess threat environments, at no time did I feel threatened by the protesters or assess them to be violent.”
- Also slated to testify today is William Barr, the attorney general, who was beside Trump that day at Lafayette Square and who later defended the decision to unleash chemical agents and flash grenades. He will speak to the House Judiciary Committee, where he’s expected to face tough questioning from Democrats on the administration’s response to the nationwide protests and his decision to drop charges against Michael Flynn, the president’s disgraced former national security adviser, among other issues.
|
 | | Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times |
|
President Trump toured a biotechnology lab in Morrisville, N.C., yesterday before participating in a coronavirus briefing. |
How Fred Trump influenced Donald Trump |
With the release this month of Mary Trump’s book, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” new attention has been focused on how the president’s family background influenced his psychology and politics. |
A central theme of the book is Donald Trump’s relationship with his father, Fred Trump, the powerful real estate mogul whose success paved the way for his son’s — and whose hard-nosed approach to life became a road map for Donald Trump’s personal style. |
During the coronavirus pandemic — a time of prolonged national mourning — the president has rarely offered public displays of empathy or grief. Many who knew Fred Trump say this is yet another example of his influence on his son. |
Annie answered a few questions about what she learned while reporting the piece. |
If you could sum up the core values that Fred Trump sought to instill in Donald, what would they be? How would you describe the importance of Fred’s influence on his son’s public and private persona? |
The core worldview that Fred Trump passed on to his son was a black-and-white outlook where people are loyal or disloyal — where you win or lose, dominate or submit. He also passed on this idea that work was valued above all else (see also: Trump refusing to ever call his weeks golfing in Bedminster, N.J., anything more than a “working vacation”), and that success in the family business was basically all that counted. |
In the article, you write that Fred Trump pushed his son hard to succeed — but also that he invested hundreds of millions of dollars in backstopping Donald’s business ventures, often helping him get out of financial jams. If you had to choose between one, would you say that Donald Trump was inculcated with more of an emphasis on “winning,” or on truly doing the hard work needed to get ahead? |
It’s hard to separate out nature and nurture, or to figure out how much of Donald Trump’s personality comes from his upbringing and how much is simply because he was born that way. But it is clear that what matters to him is winning, and the perception of winning. Throughout his career — maybe all the way until the coronavirus — he has been able to spin his own losses as wins, and most of the time, it worked. |
I interviewed people who worked with both Donald and Fred Trump, and they said that Fred always marveled at his son’s marketing and publicity skills. This was where father and son differed: Fred was a behind-the-scenes player, not a household name, and by design. He was scared and astounded by his son’s preternatural interest in selling himself. That part Donald Trump made up himself, and Fred was very proud of it. |
Also, I found this interesting: I asked people who knew Fred Trump if he would have been surprised that Donald Trump became president. The answer was a resounding “not at all.” It wasn’t on his radar as a goal for himself or his son, but he assumed that Donald could succeed at whatever he decided to do. |
You describe the president’s difficulties publicly expressing empathy, even amid a pandemic. Watching his response to the virus, how do you see Fred Trump’s influence playing itself out? |
It’s not so much Fred’s influence that I’ve been aware of, but most notable to me is how little Donald Trump has changed. He was unable to grieve publicly when his own father — the most important figure in his life — died. At his father’s funeral, he was only able to talk about himself and promote his own development projects, to the point where it stunned many people in the room. |
And he has not been able to publicly mourn the close to 150,000 Americans who have died from the virus. He has stunned the country by his inability to react in a presidential way to death, or properly lead a nation in mourning. Standing in the Rose Garden, he said that George Floyd was probably looking down and saying it was a “great thing that’s happening for our country,” referring to the dropping unemployment rate. For people who attended Fred Trump’s funeral, it was something like déjà vu all over again. It was, as it has always been, all about Donald Trump. |
| Were you forwarded this newsletter? Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox. |
| Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. |
|
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home