Trump news: President calls coronavirus testing 'double-edged sword' as 17 states sue over student visa rule

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White House attacked over 'atrocious' smear against Fauci

A move by Donald Trump’s administration to discredit the nation’s top infectious diseases expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, by accusing him of being frequently “wrong” about the coronavirus pandemic has been derided as “atrocious” by House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff.

The Democrat told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer the smear “is so characteristic of Donald Trump. He can’t stand the fact that the American people trust Dr Fauci and they don’t trust Donald Trump - and so he has to tear him down.”

"We need people more than ever to speak truth to power, to be able to level with the American people about what we're facing with this pandemic, how to get it under control, how to protect ourselves and our families," he continued. "That's what Dr Fauci has been trying to do and by sidelining him the president is once again interfering with an effective response to this pandemic."

"Dr Fauci is a nice man, but he's made a lot of mistakes," Trump had told Sean Hannity of Fox News in a phone interview last week, apparently trailing the tactic.

The West Wing subsequently submitted a statement to CNN on Saturday declaring that  "several White House officials are concerned about the number of times Dr Fauci has been wrong on things", giving a list of bullet points of public comments he had made that it disputed, which the network said, “resembled opposition research on a political opponent”.

In some cases, the mostly anonymous aides appear to have taken truncated quotes out of context and overlooked other inconvenient statements to push the smear.

“Fauci has a good bedside manner with the public but he has been wrong about everything I have ever interacted with him on,” said Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro, with staggering gall.

Joining Schiff in his outrage over the matter was Kathleen Sebelius, who served as secretary of Health and Human Services under Barack Obama and told Blitzer’s The Situation Room that efforts to discredit Fauci and other scientists are "potentially very, very dangerous" as the US and other countries work toward a coronavirus vaccine.

"I think people want to know from the scientists that the vaccine is safe, that it is effective, that it will not do more harm than good," she said.

"And if the public scientists have been discredited, if the president says 'don't believe them, you can't listen to them, they're often wrong,' we have then undermined a national vaccination campaign which is an essential step to bringing this horrible period to an end."

Florida coronavirus cases spike again and Houston considers new lockdown

The spat comes as new cases of Covid-19 continue to surge in the Sun Belt states, with Florida reporting a record 15,299 cases on Sunday and the Texas city of Houston weighing a return to lockdown.

Florida’s spike marked the highest single-day increase of any US state since the pandemic began, the Department of Health recording a new total of 269,811 positive cases. The Sunshine State’s death toll also rose by four, making a total of 514 deaths from Covid-19 in the last week. Disney World reopened in Orlando over the weekend, to the horror of many.

California previously held the record for the highest single-day increase with 11,694 cases on Wednesday. New York recorded 11,571 on 15 April at the height of the outbreak there but yesterday recorded its first day without a coronavirus death since March, a remarkable achievement.

In Texas, Houston mayor Sylvester Turner and Harris County judge Lina Hidalgo, both Democrats, said this weekend that a stay-at-home order is needed for America's fourth-largest city to cope with the Covid-19 surge.

The call comes after a week in which Texas continued to break records for confirmed coronavirus cases and deaths linked to the disease. State health officials reported 8,196 new cases Sunday, another 80 deaths and a total of 10,410 people hospitalised due to the virus.

The decision over a lockdown, however, rests with Republican governor Greg Abbott - who has resisted this step, saying it should be a last resort.

In all, the US is now on 3.37m cases of coronavirus and as many as 137,000 deaths.

Here’s Vincent Wood with the latest on the crisis.

Outcry as education secretary insists it's safe for children to return to schools

Betsy DeVos appeared on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday to make the case for sending America’s school children back into classrooms despite the raging pandemic.

“What we're saying is that kids need to be back in school and that school leaders across the country need to be making plans to do just that. There’s going to be the exception to the rule, but the rule should be that kids go back to school this fall,” DeVos said. “Where there are little flare-ups or hot spots, that can be dealt with on a school-by-school or a case-by-case basis.”

Calmly but methodically taken apart by host Dana Bash, DeVos’s arguments were none too impressive. 

House speaker Nancy Pelosi appeared on the same programme shortly afterwards and announced her dismay: “This is appalling... The president and his administration are messing with the health of our children. We all want our children to go back to school - teachers do, parents do and children do - but they must go back safely.”

She accused DeVos of “malfeasance” and a “dereliction of duty.”

An even more withering response came from fellow Democrat Ayanna Pressley, who tweeted: “I wouldn't trust you to care for a houseplant let alone my child.”

Trump 'wanted to sell Puerto Rico' after Hurricane Maria

Former Cabinet official Elaine Duke, who served as the president’s second secretary of Homeland Security when John Kelly was promoted to chief-of-staff, has been talking to The New York Times about Trump’s problem-solving in response to the devastating tropical storm of September 2017.

“The president’s initial ideas were more of as a businessman, you know,” she said. “Can we outsource the electricity? Can we sell the island? You know, or divest of that asset?”

Perhaps he should have offered it to Denmark in exchange for Greenland.

Oliver O’Connell has more on Duke’s insights.

Pelosi says president finally wearing mask 'an admission' he was wrong

Trump finally wore a mask as he toured the Walter Reed military veterans’ hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, on Saturday - before heading off for a long day of golf at his club in Virginia on Sunday.

Amidst all the gushing praise from conservatives for at last falling into line with everyone else, Speaker Pelosi was again a notable dissenting voice, calling the gesture “an admission”.

"I'm so glad that he obeyed the rules of the Walter Reed. You can't go see our veterans who are there without wearing a mask. Now, he's crossed a bridge," Pelosi told Bash on State of the Union. "That's an admission that if you're going to see our soldiers, you have to wear a mask. If you're going to be with our children, you have to wear a mask. If we want to stop the spread of the coronavirus, you have to wear a mask."

She also said all CDC guidelines - like the wearing of masks - should be “mandates, not requirements”.

Here’s Chiara Giordano’s report.

Trump condemns private Texas border wall built by his supporters 'to make me look bad'

The president has criticised a group of his supporters who privately financed and built a wall along the US-Mexico border in southern Texas earlier this year because the wall is already deteriorating from erosion.

The privately-funded wall was "only done to make me look bad," the president tweeted on Sunday - despite the group, “We Build the Wall,” raising $25m (£19.8m) in two years to erect it, in a show of support for Trump's immigration and border security initiatives.

The group first launched its fundraising effort during the government shutdown of December 2018 when Congress would not agree to fund Trump's wall proposal.

Griffin Connolly has more.

Trump’s chief of staff accused of ‘Nixonian’ paranoia as he attempts to flush out leakers

Mark Meadows has reportedly told West Wing staffers that he has been feeding specific titbits of information to members of the team he suspects of leaking to the press in an attempt to smoke them out, according to Axios.

Meadows claims to have already reportedly caught one leaker using this Wagatha Christie tactic, worthy of Colleen Rooney. 

Trump has reportedly repeatedly expressed anger about leaks, particularly regarding the news he slunk off to a White House bunker when peaceful George Floyd protesters gathered in Lafayette Square last month.

Previous efforts by Meadows' predecessors have included impromptu phone checks, trawling through staff call records and even a writing analysis intended to expose the insider who wrote A Warning under the pseudonym, Anonymous.

The extensive search for leakers is “unprecedented” among chiefs of staff, says presidential historian Chris Whipple. “It’s a level of paranoia that we never even saw in the Nixon White House,” he said.

US surgeon general insists ‘we can turn this thing around in two weeks’

Speaking to Margaret Brennan on CBS’s Face the Nation yesterday, an optimistic Dr Jerome Adams - described as "the nicest guy in the Trump administration" by The Washington Post - was adamant that there is a national testing strategy in place to beat the coronavirus.

He also said there was nothing wrong with changing guidance on masks because “once upon a time, we prescribed cigarettes for asthmatics and leeches and cocaine and heroin for people as medical treatments”.

Trump retweets 'Hollywood conservative' game show host and new attack on Fauci

In his search for validation on the coronavirus, the president begins his week with a slew of retweets, including a brace from the host of Wheel of Fortune and Love Connection (!).

There was also this old smear - from 11 April - against the good doctor.