He's a clown & put together a new circus.
Trump’s Coronavirus Economic Council Is Already a Mess
By Asawin Suebsaeng, Hunter Woodall, Erin Banco, Jackie Kucinich
The president touted his “Great American Economic Revival Industry Groups” on Tuesday night. But many of the leaders listed on it had no idea about their inclusion.
If an economic recovery task force is composed of members who didn’t know they’d been placed on it, does it really exist?
That’s the question President Donald Trump confronts a day after he and his staff announced a lengthy list of business heavyweights, labor leaders, celebrities, informal Trump advisers, “thought leaders,” and defense contractors who, they implied, would be working in conjunction with the president to nudge the country back to work in the face of a rising body count, a crashing economy, and public-health officials and governors’ dire warnings.
Trump proudly touted his “Great American Economic Revival Industry Groups” during a White House press briefing in the Rose Garden on Tuesday night. 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. 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. Kind of. Less than 24 hours later, it had become clear that industry groups were mainly being used as a sounding board, with some leaders even encouraging the president to not abandon public safety policy for the sake of an economic activity sugar rush. Meanwhile, Bloomberg reported that Trump was abandoning the idea of creating an in-house council of White House aides and advisors, though officials cautioned that such a proposal had never been formally announced.
The chaos had all the hallmarks of a half-baked Trump administration idea: A flashy rollout, with almost no, even rudimentary, pre-planning or execution.
For example, one of the White House’s closest outside economic advisers says he wasn’t given a heads up and only learned of his inclusion on the “Great American Economic Revival Industry Groups” list when friends started calling him to ask him if he’d heard what Trump had just said at his briefing. In fact, of the 20 The Daily Beast contacted, only two were able to definitively say they weren’t caught off-guard by their inclusion, one of whom was the Shark Tank reality-TV star and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who had campaigned for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and once publicly denounced Trump as a “jagoff.”
Some of the “thought leaders” listed by Trump and the White House didn’t even want the new council to be based in the West Wing to begin with.
“I was sort of surprised at the shape [it had] taken,” Stephen Moore, a Heritage Foundation economist who informally advises President Trump and his administration, said on Tuesday. “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.”
more:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-launched-a-coronavirus-economic-council-without-telling-members-they-were-on-it?via=newsletter&source=DDAfternoon
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