WH To Sideline Health Experts, Hail “Success Stories”

They’ve been signaling this shift all week:

The White House plans to shift its coronavirus messaging toward boosting the economy and highlighting “success stories” of businesses, reducing its public emphasis on health statistics, according to two officials familiar with the planning.

Driving the news: The Coronavirus Task Force — and the doctors who’ve become household names, Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci — “will continue but take a back seat to the forward-looking, ‘what’s next’ message,” a White House official told Axios.

Nothing’s ever set with Trump, and these decisions will be made day by day. But on Saturday, for the first day in weeks, the White House didn’t hold a press briefing and the president made no public appearances.

Jared’s “this is a great success story” is like Bush’s “Heck-of-a-job” except it’s exponentially more ridiculous and detached from reality. https://t.co/ssIn8B58H7

— Sam Stein (@samstein) April 29, 2020

.@MaddowBlog: Jared Kushner tries to repackage failure as “a great success story”https://t.co/7HvI6eVGmn

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) May 3, 2020

Jared Kushner shouldn’t be overseeing anything—much less part of a national response to this crisis.

We need a bold, actionable plan that prepares us for a post-coronavirus economy that keeps our communities safe—not a vision board from these two.https://t.co/UzNdPubgud

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) May 2, 2020