The Trump White House has a new internal battle: how much to talk publicly about a pandemic thats crippling huge swaths of America.
President Donald Trumps top aides are divided over the merits of resuming national news briefings to keep the public informed about the latest coronavirus statistics as infection rates spike in large states including California, Texas, Florida, Arizona and Georgia.
White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, senior adviser Jared Kushner, press secretary Kayleigh McEnany and counselor to the president Hope Hicks are among the aides arguing against these regular sessions because they want to keep the White House focused on the path forward and the nascent economic recovery without scaring too much of the country about a virus resurgence when infections are rising at different paces in different regions.
Other senior aides, as well as Vice President Mike Pence and his team, believe keeping Americans up to date about the nature of the outbreak is critical as the death toll rises. More than 126,000 people have perished in the U.S. because of the coronavirus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the governments own experts are warning of serious trouble ahead.
The brewing internal fight shows the extent to which the White House has lost control of its messaging on Covid-19 the disease caused by the novel coronavirus as the majority of voters disapprove of Trumps handling of the virus, according to interviews with a half-dozen current and former senior administration officials and Republicans close to the White House.
Trumps standing in the polls has slipped in recent weeks among senior citizens, suburban women and white non-college-educated voters, all critical constituencies for the president heading into the heat of his reelection race. Top aides cannot determine the best way for Trump to appear in control of the response while the president himself has remained focused on culture-war concerns such as protests, the removal of monuments and the funding of law enforcement.
Trump has told advisers and allies he expects a vaccine for the novel coronavirus to arrive this fall, a timeline for which there is no certainty, and he wants aides to offer both facts and a message of optimism to the public, a senior administration official said.
Since the federal governments Covid-19 task force discontinued its daily briefings in May, Pence has taken on most of the administrations coronavirus messaging responsibilities through interviews with local news outlets, outreach to religious groups and engagement with key constituencies. Several of his trips outside Washington in the past two months have featured informal updates on state reopenings, disease transmission and the status of a vaccine.
Now, Trump aides are trying to decide whether to put the national spotlight back on what they have spent months arguing is a series of state and local issues that had previously been relegated to the vice presidents office.
Cutting back on the briefings left a void that was filled by the media and the presidents political opponents in order to mislead people, and it resulted on the administration being put on the defensive, a second senior administration official said.
Core to their conundrum is the president himself. Trump loves the spotlight, and his briefings during the heart of the crisis turned into protracted events that sometimes stretched for two hours with the president straying off message and generating negative headlines.
Those sessions have no end goal and just focus on the political issue of the day, said another senior administration official. A large group of advisers in the White House think it would be more effective to do more regionally focused press than national briefings.
The coronavirus void at the White House after a historic stretch of briefings by the president himself is highlighting the holes in Trumps latest approach as he focuses on other matters while blaming the media for focusing on the coronavirus.
Trumps handling of the virus risks damaging his standing even further, making him look out of touch with even his own supporters in red states now struggling with the virus resurgence.