Trump a presence in Florida as governor deals with COVID-19

The calls happened in the hours preceding President Donald Trump’s declaration of his newly adopted home state as a disaster area, before the president’s brief flirtation with a New York quarantine and, again, ahead of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ sudden reversal on his resistance to a statewide stay-at-home order.

When big announcements are coming in the fight against the coronavirus in the president’s newly adopted home state, Trump and DeSantis get on the phone.

Over the last week, as the COVID-19 outbreak has escalated in Florida and across the country, the allies have kept in touch and in sync in their response to the global pandemic.

They have consulted about emergency supplies, rapid testing and cruise ships carrying sick passengers and crew en route to South Florida.

And they’ve stayed onmessage about the pandemic, both touting the potential benefits of an unproven lupus treatment, both stressing the need to consider the economy along with public health, and both speaking rosily — until the last few days — about returning to life as usual by mid-April.

The connection has had its benefits, with Trump suggesting that his relationship with Florida has played a role in its ability to get millions of pieces of medical equipment from a federal stockpile stretched thin by requests from all over the country.

“What I think the president is able to do is overcome the bureaucracy,” DeSantis said, shortly after Trump issued his disaster declaration for Florida last week.

But critics also worry that DeSantis — a former congressman whose staunch defense of Trump helped him win the president’s endorsement in the 2018 Republican gubernatorial primary — has been too deferential to a president slow to accept the scope of the pandemic, leading to a sluggish response to a crisis that has now claimed more than 100 lives in the state.

“He’s our governor — not Trump’s,” said Miami

Congresswoman and former Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, among the many Democrats who pressured DeSantis for days to issue a statewide stay-at-home order before he relented Wednesday. “He freezes with indecision when he should just make decisions based on what the public health people say.”

Helen Aguirre Ferré, DeSantis’ spokeswoman, dismissed suggestions that the governor has looked to Trump as a decision maker for the state on issues such as a statewide lockdown.

“He has said that the opinion of the administration carries weight with him but his decisions are based upon what is best for Florida,” she said.

And Trump said Thursday that DeSantis’ decision to issue a stay-at-home order the previous day was the governor’s alone.

“He made the decision,” Trump said, during a

White House briefing.

“But we spoke before he made the decision, yes.”

DeSantis, though, waited first for clear direction from the federal government, arguing as recently as Tuesday afternoon that the White House task force had not yet advised the move. Trump declined to say publicly that DeSantis should shut down the state. And Vice President Mike Pence, who is the official head of the coronavirus task force, deferred to DeSantis and local health officials’ judgment.

It wasn’t until U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams asserted on national TV Wednesday morning that the national guidelines the task force issued were a de facto stay-athome order for every state that DeSantis changed his position, saying Trump’s decision to extend the guidelines until the end of April was a sign that life would not be returning to normal anytime soon.

Trump and DeSantis have worked hand-in-glove on other issues, too, with Trump announcing Saturday morning, following a call with DeSantis, that he was considering a quarantine of New York, the country’s coronavirus epicenter. DeSantis had complained for days before the call that New Yorkers were fleeing a lockdown in the state by the thousands on Floridabound flights.

Ferré, the DeSantis spokeswoman, acknowledged Thursday that the issue of a New York quarantine came up. “In a call between Governor DeSantis and President Trump where the governor was inquiring about the Abbott Labs rapid-result tests, President Trump mentioned the possibility of a quarantine for the New York City area,” she said.

Trump ultimately rejected a mandatory quarantine for a tri-state area around New York to keep coronavirus carriers from bringing the disease to Florida, saying at a Sunday news conference that while he “would love” to close the airports to keep New Yorkers from flying to “Florida where they have less of a problem,” he opted not to take action because a quarantine would be hard to enforce.

Quarantine aside, Trump has at times appeared to favor Florida over other states. While other governors have resorted to begging or table-banging to get emergency medical supplies, DeSantis’ administration has received just about every mask and gown his state has requested from the federal government.

The president at a Sunday news conference said it was because Florida has “been very aggressive in trying to get things.” Days earlier, though, Trump said that governors who are not “appreciative” enough of his efforts no longer receive personal calls from him.

According to a state spokesman Thursday, Florida is waiting for its third shipment from the national stockpile, at which point the state will have received 1.3 million surgical masks, 714,000 gloves, 540,000 N95 masks, 246,000 face shields, 201,000 gowns, and 1,026 coveralls. Jared Moskowitz, the director of Florida’s Division of Emergency Management, said Monday that the state has also received 3,000 ventilators, 3,000 hospital beds and 150 ICU beds.

A spokesperson for the Federal Emergency Management Agency told McClatchy in an email that National Strategic Stockpile supplies are being shipped to states based on their population size, as determined by the U.S. Census that was completed 10 years ago in 2010, and not by the amount of supplies that each governor requested. Supplies are also going first to the “highest-risk healthcare personnel” in cities, states and territories, the email said.

“High transmission areas are prioritized, and quantities are based on population,” the spokesperson said, declining to itemize Florida’s total allocation.

Even before Florida announced its first two confirmed COVID-19 cases one month ago, DeSantis had remained in close contact with the Trump administration and adopted much of the same messaging, rarely straying from the talking points relied upon by the White House.

He has talked up hydroxycholorquine, a lupus medication cited by Trump as a promising treatment for COVID-19, and ordered it for hospitals in South Florida to provide to patients who request it. And, as Trump began to stress the need to avoid an economic meltdown, initially looking to Easter as a possible date to reopen the country, DeSantis himself pointed to April 15 as recently as Monday as a target date to hopefully return to normalcy.

It wasn’t until Wednesday, after the White House displayed forecasts that showed the country’s epidemic peaking this month

— and Florida’s in early May — that DeSantis adopted a more sober outlook.