As testing shortages continue to hinder Maine and states across the country in the fight against coronavirus, governors in both parties have been forced to push back on Trump’s misleading statements on testing. His administration released an inaccurate breakdown that overstated Maine and other states’ testing capacity while Trump attacked governors who have spoken out about the need for more federal support.

 

Even though widespread testing is central to the Trump administration’s own guidelines for reopening state economies, the president has failed to provide the federal support to make that testing possible and supported protestors who are calling on governors to ignore those guidelines.

 

Trump’s failure to act in the early months of this crisis is directly linked to the testing shortages we are experiencing now, but Senator Collins defended the president’s initial response to coronavirus, saying he “did a lot that was right in the beginning.” Now that even Republican governors are calling out Trump’s broken promises on testing, will Senator Collins finally start holding him accountable, or will she continue to defend Trump’s failures?

 

Associated Press: Governors push White House for more help with testing; Trump says they’re playing politics

 

By Alan Suderman, John Hanna, and Jill Colvin

 

Key Points:

 

  • A chorus of governors from both parties pushed back hard Monday after President Trump accused Democrats of playing “a very dangerous political game” by insisting there is a shortage of tests for coronavirus. The governors countered that the White House must do more to help states do the testing that’s needed before they can ease up on stay-at-home orders.

 

  • The plea for stepped-up coordination came on the latest day when the Trump administration provided discordant messaging: Trump blasted state leaders on Twitter for being too dependent on federal government and said later that some governors just didn’t understand what they had, while Vice President Mike Pence assured governors the government was working around-the-clock to help them ramp up testing.

 

  • Maine Gov. Janet Mills joined the call, as she has on more than a half-dozen similar calls between Pence and the nation’s governors, but issues surrounding testing capacity were not resolved, said Lindsay Crete, Mills’ press secretary, citing inaccuracies in a state-by-state breakdown of each state’s testing capacity the White House distributed before the call.

 

  • “While the administration is still reviewing the document, it does not appear to be accurate and is not representative of testing capacity within Maine – a concern shared by several other governors with respect to their states,” Crete said in an email Monday night.

 

  • Crete gave two examples of errors in the document: a statement that Maine’s Health and Environmental Testing Laboratory has testing equipment that it does not have, and its failure to list a large laboratory that conducts testing.

 

  • “This inaccurate document aside, what Maine needs most right now is support from the federal government to expand testing in a significant and meaningful way, including delivery of additional testing supplies,” Crete said.

 

  • Maryland’s Republican Gov. Larry Hogan also said the assessment of states’ testing capacity contained inaccuracies. He said much of the unused lab machinery listed for his state was in federal labs that the state does not have access to. Pence agreed to open up federal labs to help states. Hogan announced Monday the state received 500,000 tests from South Korea – a “game-changing” deal that was negotiated by his wife, Yumi Hogan, who grew up outside Seoul. “They want the states to take the lead, and we have to go out and do it ourselves, and so that’s exactly what we did,” Hogan said.

 

  • Trump didn’t take that lying down. In his daily briefing, he said that some governors have “more capacity than they understand.” He named Hogan and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, among leaders he said don’t grasp the extent of available testing already in their states. 

 

  • As Pence spoke with the governors, Trump took to Twitter with a more combative tone than his vice president, complaining that the “radical left” and “Do Nothing Democrats” were playing politics with their complaints about a lack of tests. 

 

  • “Now they scream ….‘Testing, Testing, Testing,’ again playing a very dangerous political game,” Trump tweeted. “States, not the Federal Government, should be doing the Testing – But we will work with the Governors and get it done. This is easy compared to the fast production of thousands of complex Ventilators!”

 

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