President Donald Trump took a break from his daily showdowns with the White House press corps Saturday and Sunday that does not mean that the president is staying away from the West Wing press briefing room as he leads the administration’s response to the Wuhan Flu.
There was some confusion about whether or not there would be a briefing Sunday. The White House press pool, reporters selected to cover events where it is impractical to have a large crowd was supposed to come in at 4 p.m., at which point they would either cover something or be dismissed.
In the pre-Wuhan Flu days, the weekend pool would show up by 9 a.m., load up into a van and then join the president’s motorcade to his Trump National Golf Club in Potomac Falls, Virginia, where Trump would golf and the reporters would hang out at an Italian restaurant just outside the club’s gate.
Those days seem like a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
At or about 3:45 p.m., the pool was told to be at the White House for 6 p.m., which got people excited for the return of the COVID-19 briefings, but an hour later, the “lid” was called, meaning there would be no news out of the White House until the morning.
Washington Post reporter Anne Rumsey Gearan, who was the print pool reporter for the day, asked the White House press office about plans for First Lady Melania Trump’s 50th birthday, but there was no response before the lid was called.
It is important to remember Melania was born Slovenia, then part of Marxist Yugoslavia held together by strongman Marshal Broz Tito. Raised in a rural Catholic home, under communism, the first lady is far more conservative than the president, who often had to forgo ideology to get his developments built in New York City.
Back in those pre-Wufan Flu days, such an occasion would be a blowout party at Mar-a-largo, or at least dinner at Washington’s Trump International Hotel.
At Friday’s briefing the president did not take questions and the briefing lasted barely 20 minutes, unlike other briefings that regularly clock in at more than two hours.
Earlier in the day, the president did give it a try. At roughly 10 minutes past noon, Trump hosted the day’s press pool, into the Oval Office for his signing H.R. 266, the Paycheck Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act.
The $320 million extension of the Paycheck Protection Program had been held up by Capitol Hill Democrats, but when it finally came to the House floor it passed 385 to 5 and by unanimous consent in the Senate.
Once the president signed the bill, the first question out of the gate asked Trump is he was, in fact, a mass murderer of Americans.
Q: Mr. President, 50,000 people have died today. You’re saying that you want credit for what the government has done. Do you take any responsibility for these 50,000 deaths that have happened in this country?
Who could blame Trump for taking a break?
Trump reaches out to Catholics
Saturday, the president reached out to more than 600 Catholic leaders and educators with a virtual meeting. On the call were New York City’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan and Boston’s Sean O’Malley, along with Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, and Catholic educators and bishops.
In the conference call, Trump heard about how Catholic schools, and the country’s 1.7 million schoolchildren receiving a Catholic education, were handling the pandemic triggered by the Wuhan Flu.
When O’Malley, who took over the Archdiocese of Boston, as it was rocked by a tsunami clerical abuse cases 17 years ago, was given his shot to speak to the president, he made the pitch for tuition aid for students in Catholic schools—which he pointed out had an unmatched record of pulling children out of poverty and into the middle class.
The president talked bout his appreciation for the Catholic parishes and schools he knew as he grew up in Queens, N.Y., and took the opportunity to reaffirm his opposition to abortion rights and his support for the annual March for Life.
Soon after the call, Trump Tweeted out that he would be tuning in for the 10:15 Sunday Mass, celebrated by Dolan at St. Patrick Cathedral in midtown Manhattan.
In his homily, the cardinal took time to wish the first lady a happy birthday and he gave his former midtown neighbor a shoutout and told Trump he was praying for him.
This is the same cardinal, who routinely wrote to President Barack Obama to protest Obama’s encroachment into Catholic faith practices, by which he used carrots and sticks to compel Catholics to embrace same-sex marriage, abortion rights and birth control, among other sins.
When Obama called Dolan in 2012, to say he was delaying compulsory birth control coverage for health insurance plans at Catholic institutions and orders, Dolan wrote: “In effect, the president is saying we have a year to figure out how to violate our consciences.”
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Neil W. McCabe is a Washington-based national political reporter for The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. In addition to the Star Newspaper, he has covered the White House, Capitol Hill and national politics for One America News, Breitbart, Human Events and Townhall. Before coming to Washington, he was a staff reporter for Boston’s Catholic paper, The Pilot, and the editor of two Boston-area community papers, The Somerville News and The Alewife. McCabe is a public affairs NCO in the Army Reserve and he deployed for 15 months to Iraq as a combat historian.
