Your Daily Dose of Trump and His Administration News
- The Trump campaign said it would resume credentialing reporters for Bloomberg News after the company’s owner, Michael Bloomberg, dropped out of the Democratic presidential race.
- President Trump signed an $8.3 billion emergency funding bill early Friday to assist the fight against the coronavirus.
- Trump on Elizabeth Warren: “I think lack of talent was her problem. She had a tremendous lack of talent … she is a very mean person and people don’t like her. People don’t want that. They like a person like me that isn’t mean.”
- Trump says the coronavirus will help the economy by stopping travel. “A lot of people are staying here. They’re going to be doing their business here. They’re going to be traveling here. They’ll be going to resorts here. And, you know, we have a great place … we’re going to have Americans staying home.”
- “The best estimates now of the overall mortality rate for COVID-19 is somewhere between 0.1% and 1%,” Adm. Brett Giroir, assistant secretary for health at Health and Human Services, says. “That’s lower than you heard probably in many reports … it’s not likely in the range of 2 to 3%”
- President Trump met with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro on Friday night at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, FL.
- Facebook will remove President Trump’s reelection ads that claim to be part of the census from the social media platform. The online ads were deemed deceptive because they mimic official census letters going out across the country next week and could confuse people and suppress census responses.
- UPDATE on an item from 3/6
President Trump visited the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) headquarters in Atlanta, after the White House initially cancelled the trip, saying a suspected case of coronavirus at the facility ended up testing negative.
- After Vice President Mike Pence complimented Democratic Washington Gov. Jay Inslee as he handles the outbreak of the viral coronavirus in his state, President Trump called Inslee “a snake” and said he told Pence “not to be complementary to the governor.” “I said, ‘if you’re nice to him he will take advantage.'”
- President Trump on Friday announced that Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) would replace Mick Mulvaney as his chief of staff. Trump announced the news in a tweet, saying he would appoint Mulvaney as U.S. special envoy for Northern Ireland.
- US Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn: As of Friday at 6 p.m. ET, 5,861 tests for coronavirus have been completed by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and public health labs.
- The White House this week rejected a recommendation from health officials that elderly people and those who are “physically fragile” not fly on commercial airplanes. The Trump administration has since suggested that those who are most susceptible to the virus not travel, but, according the source have “stopped short of stronger guidance” laid out by the CDC.
- On Friday, as coronavirus infections rapidly multiplied aboard a cruise ship marooned off the coast of California, health department officials and Vice President Mike Pence came up with a plan to evacuate thousands of passengers. Quickly removing passengers was the safest outcome, health officials and Pence reasoned.
But President Trump had a different idea: Leave the infected passengers on board — which would help keep the number of U.S. coronavirus cases as low as possible. “Do I want to bring all those people off? People would like me to do it,” Trump admitted at a press conference at the CDC later on Friday. “I would rather have them stay on, personally. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.”
- Education secretary Betsy DeVos has introduced a new rule that could make it harder for child abuse victims to come forward at school. The Trump administration introduced changes to Title IX to be rolled out this month about how sexual assault and harassment chargers are handled at K-12 schools and on college campuses.
Schools would face stricter definitions of misconduct and new standards for launching investigations under the DeVos plan. Victims would have to navigate changed requirements to file complaints, and alleged perpetrators may have an opportunity to challenge their accusers, through lawyers or advisers.
- Trump’s Surgeon General Jerome Adams refused to tell Jake Tapper how many people have been tested for COVID-9.. He said check with CDC, but Tapper noted CDC took that info offline. Then he said check a transcript of FDA’s statement yesterday, but Tapper noted FDA only shared how many kits it sent.
- In a Sunday morning Tweet, President Trump railed against what he called the “fake news media,” claiming they are trying to do “everything possible” to make his administration “look bad” in its response to the coronavirus, as the White House faces mounting scrutiny over the spread and the lack of testing taking place.
Trump Tweeted: “We have a perfectly coordinated and fine tuned plan at the White House for our attack on CoronaVirus. We moved VERY early to close borders to certain areas, which was a Godsend. V.P. is doing a great job. The Fake News Media is doing everything possible to make us look bad. Sad!”
- President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence have declined an invitation to attend the annual St. Patrick’s Day lunch on Capitol Hill on Thursday, marking the first time since the event’s founding more than three decades ago that neither the president nor vice president will attend.
The White House pinned Trump’s decision not to attend the lunch – a bipartisan tradition celebrating US-Ireland relations – on his strained relationship with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The lunch is hosted each year by the sitting speaker, and Pelosi invited the President last month.
The Past 24 Hours Or So 