The list went on and on. “Wendy’s, Waffle House, Starbucks, Wolfgang Puck, Thomas Keller, Jean-Georges — my friend, Jean-Georges — and Daniel,” President Trump said in the last of the evening sunshine. “You know them.”
Jean-Georges is Jean-Georges Vongerichten, whose eponymous restaurant in Manhattan’s Trump International Hotel is one of the president’s favorite dining spots. And now, the restaurateur is one of more than 200 people appointed to the Great American Economic Revival Industry Groups, 17 panels covering everything from healthcare to hospitality, that the president hopes will help plot a course back from the economic devastation wrought by COVID-19.
“So, those are the names that we have on our list,” Trump said. “They’re the names that are, I think, the best and the smartest, the brightest, and they’re going to give us some ideas.”
After weeks of questions about how the president planned to reopen the economy, there was an answer.
For a senior administration official watching proceedings on television from his home work station, it looked like a “kitchen sink” approach. “One extreme to another,” said the official, who had been trying to harness some of the dozens of existing advisory committees in the effort. “Tiny group of insiders to every person ever.”
It was a typically idiosyncratic move by a president facing an anxious public and the most difficult decision of his presidency. His scientific advisers, such as Drs. Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci, had been public in warning that lifting social distancing restrictions too early would lead to a spike in COVID-19 cases, but, at the same time, an influential group of aides, interest groups, and allies in late-night telephone calls was telling him that any delay would disproportionately hurt the voters who propelled him to power.
White House officials past and present described the voices urging him to move faster rather than slower in easing his federal guidelines.
Inside the administration, the key players are the president’s chief economic adviser Larry Kudlow, the vice president’s chief of staff Marc Short, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. They are joined by two China hawks in trade adviser Peter Navarro and Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, who regularly make the case that the longer the shutdown continues, the more danger there is that manufacturers and supply chains will disappear overseas.
Navarro told the New York Times: “It’s disappointing that so many of the medical experts and pundits pontificating in the press appear tone-deaf to the very significant losses of life and blows to American families that may result from an extended economic shutdown.”
That argument is resonating with Trump, according to a former campaign official briefed on White House deliberations.
“Think of small business owners and all the millions of people that work in stores, the leisure industry,” he said. “These are the people who can’t just take a laptop home and work from there. And that’s Main Street. That’s not just the Trump base but the Republican base.”
Critical in making the case, according to two sources, is Linda McMahon, an old friend of the president who now heads America First Action, the biggest Trump-aligned super PAC. Before taking on that role, she led the Small Business Administration.
And the influential radio host Rush Limbaugh is amplifying the message in his daily show. Hours before Trump announced his new panels on Tuesday, Limbaugh described the economic damage in manageable terms, avoiding percentages or abstract ideas such as gross domestic product and mind-boggling numbers. “I see all these businesses that are closed, and, as I drive by them and look at them, I wonder: How many of these businesses were people’s life’s work? How many of these businesses? Be they restaurants or whatever, how many of them represent a boarded-up, closed life’s dream?”
Trump may now have dozens of business brains in his panels, from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Apple’s Tim Cook to big donors such as casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and friends that include the New England Patriots’ Bob Kraft, to call on. But the suspicion is that this “kitchen sink” cabinet will play second fiddle to his existing circle of confidants.
“The president is nothing if not a creature of habit,” as one insider put it.
