It's all downhill from here

Yes, Trump said that.

Under pressure, members of the coronavirus task force discussed privately how parts of the country might be opened in April, but cautioned Trump not to get locked into a specific timetable given the deteriorating conditions in New York hospitals and ominous upticks in cases in New Orleans, Detroit, and elsewhere. “They discussed it internally, but they never intended Trump to announce it,” a Republican working with the task force told me.

  Vanity Fair

Well, that was stupid. Have they MET Trump?

Trump’s impulsive decision—and its messy aftermath—consumed the West Wing during the critical week that governors were pleading with the White House to deliver medical supplies before hospital systems began to collapse. “It was totally crazy,” the Republican told me. Dr. Fauci, Senator Lindsey Graham, and others raced to convince Trump that an Easter opening would be a cataclysmic error that could cost millions of lives. “This is a very, very stressful situation for everybody, including me,” Fauci told me in a phone interview on Monday. By last weekend Fauci’s arguments broke through: Trump agreed to extend the social distancing guidelines until the end of April.

[...]

Trump learned that his close friend, 78-year-old New York real estate mogul Stan Chera, had contracted COVID-19 and fallen into a coma at NewYork-Presbyterian. “Boy, did that hit home. Stan is like one of his best friends,” said prominent New York Trump donor Bill White.

I was wrong, apparently. He DOES have a friend in a coma. He has a friend.

Trump also grew concerned as the virus spread to Trump country. “The polling sucked. The campaign panicked about the numbers in red states. They don’t expect to win states that are getting blown to pieces with coronavirus,” a former West Wing official told me. From the beginning of the crisis, Trump had struggled to see it as anything other than a political problem, subject to his usual arsenal of tweets and attacks and bombast. But he ultimately realized that as bad as the stock market was, getting coronavirus wrong would end his presidency. “The campaign doesn’t matter anymore,” he recently told a friend, “what I do now will determine if I get reelected.”

And he's certainly doing a bang-up job!

For an ordinary West Wing dealing with a crisis of this magnitude, the chief of staff would be a central player, mediating, delegating, making the trains on time. But Trump has only very intermittently been able to tolerate another person with power in his White House. Mick Mulvaney had essentially been a lame duck for months, and since he was pushed out in early March, there’s been no chief of staff at all—Mark Meadows, whom Trump appointed weeks ago, only resigned his congressional seat on Monday to fill the post.

[...]

Jared Kushner, who’s often been in competition with Trump’s chiefs of staff, continues to be the central West Wing player, leading a shadow coronavirus task force that is more powerful than the official group led by Vice President Mike Pence. In conversations Kushner has blamed HHS Secretary Alex Azar for the criticism Trump has received, according to a person in frequent touch with the West Wing. “This was a total mess,” Kushner told people when he got involved last month. “I know how to make this government run now,” he said, according to a source.

And HE'S doing a bang-up job.

The White House downplayed tensions between Kushner and the task force. “The vice president and Jared work so well together because they both view their roles through the lens of what’s best for the American people and how do we best serve the president,” deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley said.

Take a minute. I'll wait till you're finished laughing.

Last week he called Wall Street executives and asked for advice on how to help New York, people briefed on the conversation said. Kushner encouraged Trump to push back against New York governor Andrew Cuomo after Cuomo gave an emotional press conference during which he said New York was short 30,000 ventilators. In a White House meeting around this time, Kushner told people that Cuomo was being an alarmist. “I have all this data about ICU capacity. I’m doing my own projections, and I’ve gotten a lot smarter about this. New York doesn’t need all the ventilators,” Kushner said, according to a person present. During an interview on Hannity on March 26, Trump said: “I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators.”

Kushner declined to comment. But the White House press shop sent a statement from Fauci: “The interactions between Jared Kushner and Vice President Pence have added real value to the discussions at the coronavirus task force. They complement each other very well by providing information and opinions derived from shared and sometimes different perspectives. The bottom line and goal of both of them is to always get the facts straight and to act on and make decisions based on the best available evidence.”

You see, this is why I don't trust Fauci, the guy everybody thinks is saving us. He also either lied or was uninformed about Italy's response to the pandemic.

Meanwhile, Trump is also consulting his longtime confidante Hope Hicks, whom Trump hired back in February (Hicks had been serving as chief communications officer for Fox Corp., the parent company of Fox News). Officially, Hicks reports to Kushner, but according to sources, Hicks is constantly with Trump. “Hope is in charge of Trump’s calendar, which means Jared is in charge of Trump’s schedule,” a Republican who deals with the White House said. Sources said Hicks prepares Trump for his daily task force briefings and advises him to act presidential.

How's that working out? Apparently, Hicks is his Chief of Staff.

For weeks, according to sources, Kushner has been looking to sideline [communications director Stephanie] Grisham but has been unable to displace her because Grisham remains close to Melania Trump, whom Grisham did communications for when she worked in the East Wing. “Jared doesn’t tell Grisham what he’s working on. At this point Stephanie has just given up,” a person close to Grisham said. “

Meanwhile, that idiot Hogan Gidley -whatever he's supposed to be - is busy denying everything. About the situation between Kushner and Grisham:

“That is blatantly false and a sick attempt by someone to stoke division where there is none" Gidley said. "Steph and Jared have been friends since the campaign and have always worked very well together.”

About Hicks trying to get Trump to "be presidential":

“No one has to give President Trump advice about being presidential—he is just a natural-born leader—and in this time of crisis, the country clearly sees the president is focused on the safety and security of the American people and always has their backs.”

[...]

Trump’s press conferences for the last few weeks had mostly been rally substitutes—boastful, contentious, featuring Trump as pitchman, selling the great job the administration was doing and the beautiful future after the novel coronavirus had magically flowed through, while compulsively blame-shifting to China, the media, governors, anyone but his own administration. But on Tuesday the event turned somber, with Trump trying to put the best possible face on a terrifying set of metrics—100,000 to 200,000 dead Americans, even if, as Dr. Deborah Birx said, safety measures continued—that he’d been trying to push away and wish away for weeks. Whatever his tone, it will be a very hard future to sell.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.