Date: 2024-12-21 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00018688
The Trump Presidency
Coronavirus Crisis and Trump Chaos
Trump’s coronavirus call with top Wall Street execs immediately devolved into ‘a bit of a disaster’: Politico reporter
Peter Burgess
President Donald J. Trump, joined by Vice President Mike Pence and members of the White House COVID-19 Coronavirus task force, delivers remarks and answers questions from members of the press Thursday, April 2, 2020, in the James S. Brady White House Press Briefing Room. (Official White House Photo by D. Myles Cullen)
President Donald Trump on Wednesday held a call with top Wall Street executives and bankers to discuss reopening the economy. But according to Politico reporter Ben White, things did not go well.
“The whole thing was a bit of a disaster, the way they announced this on Tuesday,” White explained on MSNBC, “read a lot of corporate CEO names that had no idea they were a part of this effort to reopen the economy, didn’t give anybody really time to plan to be on these calls. Among the Wall Street executives, a lot of them had earnings yesterday and couldn’t be on the call. One JP Morgan executive tried for 20 minutes to get in and couldn’t.”
“What they’re telling the president is, yes, of course we want the economy reopened. We want businesses to start up again,” he continued. “But we cannot do that, our employees will not feel safe until the testing regime is much more widespread, until people don’t feel like they’re going out to be guinea pigs to get the virus. There’s simply no way to do it that way. Make people feel safe. Make business owners feel like demand is going to be there and then you can start to reopen. So the whole thing was slap dash in the way it was set up, and slap dash in the way it was executed and I think Trump heard a lot of things maybe he didn’t want to hear.”
According to White’s Politico article, one top executive described the call with Trump as a “sh*t show.”
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