Today, Explained - Can President Trump fix this?

Episode Date: March 17, 2020

After dismissing coronavirus concerns for months, President Donald is pivoting to serious action to slow the crisis in the United States. (Transcript here.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos for I'm Back from quite possibly the worst time vacation in the history of travel. But it seemed like a good idea two weeks ago. And that's the thing about this novel coronavirus crisis we're all in. So much changes so fast. On Sunday, the CDC said no gatherings over 50 people. On Monday, President Trump reduced that number to 10 as he warned that this outbreak could extend well into the summer. Yesterday, Ohio's governor said the state would postpone today's primary. Then an Ohio judge said no dice. Then the governor said he'd ignore the judge. Never has the news more needed to be explained.

So we are going to up our game. From today onward, we're going to open every episode of Today Explained with an update on all the latest coronavirus news. After that, we'll take a quick breather and get on with the regular show, which will most likely also be about COVID-19. And you can help us. Tell us what questions you have. Email us. We're todayexplained at vox.com. Tweet at us. We're at today underscore explained. I'm at Ramis Firm. And thank you for listening. Stay safe and stay smart during this crisis. All right, let's do this. The president held a White House briefing today. He offered some tweaks to Medicare and pledged $1 trillion of stimulus,

including some Andrew Yang-style UBI, sending Americans checks in the mail in the next few weeks. A lot of that still needs to be ironed out. There's now something like 180,000 known cases of COVID-19 globally, and the United States today passed the 5,000 case marker officially. New York State confirmed over 400 new cases in the last 24 hours, bringing its confirmed cases to around 1,500. That's the highest in the United States in any state. Governor Andrew Cuomo has said the peak is still likely 45 days away in New York, and he continues to call on the federal government

to ramp up military aid to dramatically expand New York State's healthcare infrastructure. We're talking hospital beds, ICU beds. As of Tuesday afternoon, 91 people have died in the United States as a result of COVID-19. The country is ramping up efforts to restrict movement. Six counties in the San Francisco Bay Area announced a shelter-at-home order on Monday.

Canada has shut its border with very few exceptions, including Americans. And the European Commission is considering a 30-day ban on all non-essential travel. And then there's the presidential race back here in the United States. Ohio postponed, but Arizona, Florida, and Illinois are still voting today. The outbreak might not be a huge factor because millions of people have already cast their ballots in Arizona and Florida, but more on that tomorrow NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM.

Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM, a sportsbook worth a slam dunk and authorized gaming partner of the NBA. BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. For the first year or so of our show, GM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. For the first year or so of our show, we did a lot of episodes about the firings, the replacements, the vacancies in the Trump administration. We use the word unprecedented a lot. And whenever we did these episodes, people like Ezra Klein or Matthew Iglesias would say, look, the president hasn't really been tested yet.

Imagine how this would all work in a crisis. Now the crisis is here. Millions of people are losing their jobs. The economy is in a tailspin. People are dying. I asked Matthew Iglesias whether President Trump is capable of leading the country out of this crisis and what that might look like. But we started with the job he's done so far. It's not great, right? I mean, we have seen over the years lots of examples of the Trump administration being disorganized, being dishonest, being inaccurate, having difficulty collecting information from well-qualified experts. But it hasn't really mattered in incredibly concrete, tangible ways outside of this specific

situation with Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. But now we have an honest-to-God national crisis, a genuinely very difficult situation that, you know, any presidency would struggle with. And you see that the Trump administration is really flailing. They are failing to do the sort of basic element of communicating in a clear and consistent way what's going on. And it's genuinely very scary. Before we get into all the details of how this administration has handled the novel coronavirus this year, let's just talk about steps that were taken before this was even on anyone's radar. And I'm talking specifically about something we've mentioned

on the show before, which is that there was this pandemic group set up within the National Security Council during the Obama administration, and this administration disbanded that? When you say me, I didn't do it. We have a group of people I could, I could ask perhaps my administration, but I could perhaps ask Tony about that because I don't know anything about it. Yeah, they disbanded it. This was during John Bolton's tenure as national security advisor. He said he wanted to, quote unquote, streamline the process. He sort of dismissed this group. And it's part of a larger pattern that we've seen, which is the Trump administration repeatedly proposed very large cuts to the Centers for Disease Control, including, you know, in their most recent budget submission, which was just

last month. And ideologically, temperamentally, they did not believe that pandemic preparedness was an important topic, that it didn't deserve that kind of high-level coordination effort, that the agencies involved with it didn't deserve a lot of money, and that it wasn't an important kind of thing to do. And you've seen that same mentality sort of play out over the course of February and March. And then Trump has not had the flexibility to change quickly, even when it became clear that, you know, this really was an important subject. So once the novel coronavirus is on the administration's radar, let's say January,

early February, what exactly does the Trump administration do? Do they ramp up the CDC? Do they ramp up the NIH? Do they get everyone moving or what? Well, so Trump does what he thinks is taking it seriously, and that's he moves relatively quickly to restrict travel from China. The Trump administration says it will now bar foreign nationals entering the United States if they've been here to China in the 14 days before they arrived. Because he, you know, has it in his head that this is a foreign problem. He's really big on being tough on borders.

At the same time, the travel restrictions, you know, they had exemptions. Americans, for example, were not impacted by it. And at that point, he seems to forget about it, right? He has incredible levels of confidence in border control. So he keeps saying to people in interviews, we have it so well under control. I mean, view this the same as the flu. Because of all we've done, the risk to the American people remains very low. And then internally, he just doesn't do anything. So we look back and we say, maybe these restrictions were a good idea. Maybe he bought us some time before the virus came to the United States in a big way. But when you buy time, the question is, what do you do with that time?

And Trump did not get tests up and running. He didn't stockpile necessary medical supplies. He didn't develop a sort of plan B in case containment failed. And then he was slow to acknowledge that containment of the virus had, in fact, failed because he was so committed to the idea that he was this genius and his travel restrictions on China had solved the problem. And this is back in, we're talking January, early February, the whole country's focused on Iowa, New Hampshire. Are you saying that these were moments that we could have been taking critical steps to prepare the country for this virus hitting the United States?

Yeah, I mean, this could have been a good time for Trump to say, look, I'm really concerned about this virus. And we didn't know that much about the underlying science of the virus. And it would have been a good time to, you know, send up some flares, right? Say, had there been a pandemic preparedness team at the National Security Council, you could have asked them, you know, hey, man, can you update me on what's going on here? Even without it, you can scramble the jets. He could have gotten in touch with health officials personally. He could have told his cabinet, I want everybody to check in on this. What can we do? But he didn't do anything at all, you know. And he also doesn't like to be told bad news, right? When people would come to him and say, Mr. President, whether you think this border control measures are a good idea or not, they're not foolproof. We really need to keep thinking about this. Instead, he kind of declared victory and, that the CDC refused tests from the WHO. They wanted to

do their own. Those tests didn't work. And all of this has led us to this position we're in now, where we just don't have enough tests for the entire country. How much responsibility does Donald Trump bear in this testing situation? Or is there more responsibility on the shoulders of the CDC and the NIH for not doing a better job in that regard and for not maybe making the public more aware? How much are these autonomous organizations or how much is this all linked back to the administration? There have been a lot of articles on Vox.com and elsewhere warning that the Obama administration left the country inadequately prepared for a pandemic and that the Trump administration has moved us backwards. Instead of building on the work that had been done after Ebola, Trump started rolling that work back. And people have been saying for years that we are not ready for this kind of thing. And he didn't listen. And that is 100 percent his fault.

And what I've done is I'm going to be announcing exactly right now that I'm going to be putting our Vice President Mike Pence in charge. Come late February, Donald Trump does put Mike Pence in charge of this whole situation. Does that help? Does that hurt? I mean, I think it's an example of how behind the curve the administration has been. People have been saying all throughout the month of February, you need to appoint some kind of a coronavirus czar, some kind of high-level official who's in charge of coordinating all of this. And the presumption of that is that you need to do coordination, but also that the president personally can't be all coronavirus all the time. So Pence comes in, and it was a good idea to put him in charge. I mean, if you look at Mike Pence's

press conferences, they are much more sort of organized and calm and professional than the ones Trump does. My presence here today and working with you each and every day in the days ahead, I hope gives evidence of the priority the president's placed on this work. Mr. President, the last administration said that they had tested a million people at this point. Well, ask them how they did with the swine flu. It was a disaster. But with respect, you've been president for three years. But he had resisted this for weeks, and we've just been consistently two weeks or so behind the curve ever since late February. And Pence being put in charge like that and then seemingly sidelined more recently is just an example of that. Of course, last week we got the first big primetime presidential address from the Oval Office at the desk, all the bells and whistles. We will be suspending all travel from Europe to the United

States for the next 30 days. And it seemed to just confuse more than it helped. We covered it on the show. But now that some of the things that Trump announced have been implemented, like this European travel ban, what's the fallout? travel from Europe, but then they've had Americans returning from Europe trapped in these extremely long screening lines in a situation where people are just in a position to infect each other. Overnight chaos at Chicago's O'Hare Airport as passengers return home from Europe. Thousands of travelers left standing in a crowd for hours, shoulder to shoulder. This is exactly what Americans are being told to avoid. But take a look

at some of this video. We know that very long lines and long wait times hit at least three of the 13 airports screening passengers returning from Europe Saturday night. And then we don't have adequate testing to really monitor everybody who's coming back to do any kind of case tracing. And so it's likely that this effort to stem an influx of outside infected people will have actually made the problem worse. Meanwhile, making that the epicenter of his primetime address, it was just a second example of Trump being so hung up on border controls and external threat that he's not addressing the fact that we have substantial community spread inside the United States of America. Since that Oval Office address, this has become a much graver situation in the United States, from national sports leagues canceling and postponing, to schools being shut down, to cities being shut down, to people in the service industry across the country losing jobs. It's hurting a lot of people right now in a way that it wasn't even just a week ago. How has the president's messaging changed since that Oval Office address?

Well, you know, it didn't change immediately. For several days through the past weekend, he continued to sort of downplay the coronavirus, assure us that it was going to wash away really soon, and mostly seemed focused on trying to talk up the stock market. That really changed Monday afternoon. The president gave a press conference where, for the first time, he really said, like, he doesn't know how long this is going to last. It's a serious problem. He got behind CDC guidance telling people to avoid gatherings of more than 10 people. And to me, most significantly of all, he acknowledged for the first time that the reason the stock market is down is that the situation is actually quite grave and it will go back up, he said, when we resolve the coronavirus problem, which, you know,

hopefully is true. But it's wise. And President Trump, while not handling the situation perfectly by any means, is now finally taking it seriously, seeing this as a big problem. He's calling on people to avoid gathering in large groups. He's calling for the cancellation of events. He's telling people they need to stay away from bars and restaurants. And that means he's acknowledging that these public health measures are going to be a big problem for the national economy that's going to require some kind of large-scale solution,

but it's not something we can avoid. More with Matthew after the break on Today Explained. Thank you. So you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join RAMP. You can go to ramp.com slash explained. ramp.com slash explained. r-a-m-p.com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank. Member FDIC., terms and conditions apply.

Matthew, the Trump administration is finally talking about dramatic measures to shore up the millions of Americans who are already hurting and those who will be hurting as a result of this crisis. There's like Andrew Yang style checks to every American. There's apparently a $850 billion stimulus on the way. And then there's this much smaller stimulus they've been talking about for days. Let's start with that small guy because it's going to land at any moment now. The result of more than a dozen phone call negotiations between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. This is going to do some real good.

There are provisions in here that are going to sort of beef up the unemployment insurance program. They're going to beef up nutritional assistance program. Those are important measures. They are also doing some extension of paid sick leave, which is something that the politicians involved, both from the White House and Nancy Pelosi, have talked about a lot. But that's actually the area where it looks a little bit threadbare. I mean, this is going to deliver some real help to some people, but it still leaves the sick leave portion of the American safety net pretty patchy. And I would just say the scale of this package is not equal to the challenge. And clearly, the Trump administration knows this isn't enough

because it's now, as of today, offering to do much, much more. Tell me about this $850 billion package that they're now talking about. Sure. So they're talking about a large scale package that will be aimed at two things. One is kind of industry specific support. President Trump in particular has been fired up about trying to help airlines. He is also in the hotel industry and seems very open to the hotel industry's argument that they need financial support. Casinos and cruise ship companies also seem to be in the mix there. It's not entirely clear what those kinds of bailouts or financial support might look like, but this is something that, you know, I know I've spoken to Democrats on the Hill. They have

concerns about this idea, but also some recognition that it has merit. I think we're going to see a lot of discussion of this, hopefully some kind of, you know, reasonable compromise. The other piece is trying to get money into people's hands. The president had been talking about payroll tax cuts for a long time. He hasn't disavowed that. But today, he and Treasury Secretary Mnuchin both indicated that they were open to the idea of simply giving cash to individual Americans. The payroll tax holiday would get people money over the next six to eight months. We're looking at sending checks to Americans immediately. And what we've heard from hardworking Americans,

many companies have now shut down, whether it's bars or restaurants. Americans need cash now, and the president wants to get cash now. And I mean now in the next two weeks. How much? I will be previewing that with the Republicans. There's some numbers out there. They may be a little bit bigger than what's in the press. Go ahead.

That's an idea that Jason Furman, who was the chief economist in the Obama administration, has been very vocally championing. And this idea has been adopted by Senator Mitt Romney, now potentially by the Trump administration, some Democrats in Congress as well. And we'll have to see if it gains momentum. Is this like Andrew Yang's style universal basic income or is it just a one timer? come. One reason that people who are skeptical of UBI like this idea is precisely because it isn't permanent, right? So everybody will get these checks. So it gives everyone some help. But if you have a job, even during this crisis, the fact that you're getting a time-limited check is not a good reason to, like, quit your job and go live off UBI or something like that. So it has appealed to people who are skeptical of UBI. A concern that, you know, some people will continue to raise is that it's not targeted in any way, right? Lots of people urgently need financial assistance in this crisis. Plenty of other people

don't really, but they'll be getting money too. The case for doing it this way is that it's simple, it's like fair. You can easily explain to people, like, why did that guy get $1,000? Well, he got it because everybody's getting it. I think this is a good idea. It's not a cure-all for what fixes us, since obviously, no matter how much you get in a check, you're not going to take a plane flight, you know, internationally tomorrow. Large segments of the economy are just shut down. So we're going to need to either support industries or else support some kind of transition out of those industries. But, you know, giving everyone some money, that would be

nice. That would help. I guess the trillion dollar question is, how is the country going to pay for all this? I mean, in the short term, we can and should pay for it by borrowing money. Interest rates are very, very low. That's how you bolster the economy. You know, it's going to mean a higher debt level. It could mean higher taxes down the road. But I think everybody needs to be really careful here from an economic standpoint, right? We know that a lot of the economy has shut down for public health reasons, it seems like more is going to have to shut down in the future. And it's tempting to think of this as being like a light switch where, you know, you can turn it off and then you can flip it back on again. But economic life doesn't work that way, right? If millions of people lose their jobs, lose their tips, lose

their incomes, and that stays lost for a number of weeks, then even when you turn the economy back on again, they're not going to have any money. So they're not going to be able to buy anything and you're going to see cascading job losses. And you could have us sort of stalled out for a really, really long time unless we do something proactively to sort of not just help people get through this current crisis, which, you know, will be difficult, but will pass, that we're going to have to restart things once it's safe from a health standpoint. And that's going to take a sort of big shove of stimulus measures from the government. Could all of this have been avoided if this country at least were more careful? Or

is it just a case that the way we live now, the way our porous borders work, that this was coming no matter what? Look, Taiwan and Singapore have closer economic, geographical, and cultural ties to China than the United States has. They have not been unaffected by coronavirus. Nobody has been and nobody could be. But they, with sufficient proactive measures, have kept their populations largely safe and are now not shutting down their domestic economies. This is why people say you should have a president who knows what he's doing, and we don't. I guess we'll be talking a lot more about that in the coming weeks and months, Matthew. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.