Scaling Back White House Coronavirus Task Force “Bad Situation Overall,” Says UVA’s Lawless

Scaling Back White House Coronavirus Task Force “Bad Situation Overall,” Says UVA’s Lawless

University of Virginia Political Science Department Chair Jennifer Lawless said the decision to by the White House this week to curtail the coronavirus task force is “dangerous,” when she appeared on GoLocal LIVE. 

On Tuesday, the New York Times first reported that “Trump Says Task Force Will Wind Down,” writing, “Despite growing evidence that the pandemic is still raging, President Trump and other administration officials said on Tuesday that they had made so much progress in bringing it under control that they planned to wind down the coronavirus task force in the coming weeks and focus the White House on restarting the economy.”

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“Trump realized that — or the people around him realized — that being in front of a camera and being in front of the press every day for several hours at a time was hurting him, not only in terms of his poll numbers, but in terms of his overall reputation and approval in that he was often contradicting the task force,” said Lawless. 

“As for scaling back the task force itself, I think it’s consistent with the idea that Trump, Steve Mnuchin and some of the other top advisors are very, very worried about the economy and do not want to take the kinds of precautions the task force is suggesting in order to make sure we stave off future deaths, because that would require a delay in reopening large chunks of the economy,” she added. 

“It's a very bad situation overall especially given that we’re now approaching the time where various states are opening up to different degrees and so to not have an overall federal set of guidelines that are guided by science and guided by medicine make this very, very difficult — dangerous,” said Lawless.