Throughout the past week there were also confusing signals about the involvement of senior advisers Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.The back-and-forth deliberations over the “Opening Our Country Council,” as Trump called it at one point last week, laid bare for the American public the way decisions often are made in the Trump White House — through power struggles, the loose and very public airing of possible ideas and then the president making adjustments on the fly with a goal of having a big announcement.National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow said Tuesday the president would likely make an announcement later this week on when and how he intended to reopen the economy, a choice Trump has called one of the toughest decisions of his presidency.Inside the White House, aides have been zeroing in on the estimates from the nonpartisan Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, which show the U.S. is now past its peak outbreak and estimates that hospitalizations related to Covid-19 will start to rapidly decline beginning in late April.Aides are reluctant to identify May 1 as a target date given how things panned out last time — when Trump identified Easter as his target and then had to walk it back — but the president and vice president do think May is a realistic timeline for some parts of the country to begin reopening.Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has said he could see the country re-opening in phases, depending on the infection rates. By … Others said they hadn’t even committed to working with the Trump administration on this, and only agreed to take a phone call from the White House to see if the effort was worthwhile or just for show.It turns out it was the latter. And yet, many of the listed names and companies did not learn of their new, supposed advisory roles until the president read their names on live TV, or until after the White House published the full list. “What is the point of this if not to manufacture a rosier picture for the president to cite when he starts telling people it’s okay to go back out… when it might not be?”
Economic data provided by Econoday. “President Trumka is calling in to see if this is a serious effort or not.” Spokespeople and officials at various other groups and corporations also said that they were given no advance warning that their alleged participation was going to be publicly rolled out and, as such, took a more diplomatic approach to the White House on Wednesday. Trump Announces His ‘Opening the Country’ Council He read off dozens of prominent names from Wall Street, Silicon Valley and the sports world. The labor group hadn’t gotten the memo, either.Tim Schlittner, AFL-CIO communications director, told The Daily Beast that “we’d first learned [about this] from the announcement in the Rose Garden last night.” Schlittner said AFL-CIO staff also received “what appeared to be a mass email with instructions to RSVP" for a Wednesday conference call, hosted by Trump, with industry and labor organizations.“There was no call from President Trump to President Trumka on this,” he said. The White House reportedly failed to tell business leaders they would be part of Trump’s Opening Our Country Council to determine how to revive the economy stalled by the coronavirus. Trump also did not indicate who would lead the effort emanating from the various industry groups from the White House; on Monday, the councils had seemed like a potential new project for chief of staff Mark Meadows. “I have great respect for all the people in the White House, but what we’d been advising [the Trump administration] was an idea of a task force that was outside and independent of the White House, providing economic ideas in an advisory capacity.”Art Laffer, another longtime conservative economist who has for years The Trump ally said he’d received no further guidance on the matter, either “directly or indirectly” from the White House, except that he knew there was a White House conference call he was supposed to get on “today or tomorrow.” (The Daily Beast informed Laffer that the call was scheduled for Wednesday afternoon.)