Oh, great. This again. There’s once again pressure inside the Trump White House to lift social distancing guidelines earlier than public health would call for. “Hopefully, we’re going to be opening up—you could call it opening—very, very, very, very soon, I hope,” Donald Trump said in Thursday’s press briefing. Because nothing says “let’s open very, very, very, very soon” like more than 1,500 deaths a day during social distancing.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, on the other hand, plans a more responsible course of action, and is urging Trump to do the same. “I would hope that the scientific community would weigh in and say, ‘You can’t do this, it is only going to make matters worse if you go out too soon,” Pelosi told Politico of the possibility of Trump pushing to reopen things.
As for whether she still plans to reopen the House of Representatives on April 20, Pelosi said “Nobody can really tell you that and I would never venture a guess. I certainly don’t think we should do it sooner than we should.”
Members of Trump’s Cabinet, on the other hand, are pushing the idea of reopening. “I do” think things might reopen next month, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told CNBC on Thursday, a day after Attorney General William Barr called for guidelines to be dramatically eased at the end of April.
As for Dr. Anthony Fauci, he said Friday morning that “the virus kind of decides whether or not it’s going to be appropriate to open or not” and it would be a mistake “to get out there prematurely and wind up back in the same situation.” The question is whether he can convince Trump of that.
Posted with permission from Daily Kos.
