Dan Henninger: President Trump should rise above political squabble on coronavirus
WSJ Editorial Page Deputy Editor Dan Henninger told 'America's Newsroom' Americans don't want a barstool fight over a real health crisis.
President Trump's strategy on handling the spread of the coronavirus, or COVID-19, won't "backfire" as long as he "maintains his cool" and rises above political squabbling with his opponents, The Wall Street Journal's Dan Henninger said Thursday.
In an interview on "America's Newsroom," Henninger said that the president's tendency to fire back at his critics on Twitter – like calling House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer incompetent – is "not what the American people are looking for right now."
"They don't want two guys on a barstool fighting each other over Twitter and these accusations back-and-forth," he continued.
"If this is a real health care crisis, they want a president acting and looking presidential. And, I think this is an opportunity for the president to rise above the accusations and the assaults that have been thrown at him for three years and to look presidential," said Henninger, the Journal's editorial page deputy editor.
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Thus far, the disease has stricken over 82,000 people worldwide and killed over 2,700. There have been 60 confirmed cases of coronavirus in the U.S. in total. Fifteen people were in the initial set of cases, three more came from evacuation flights, and 42 were from the Diamond Princess ship that was quarantined by Japanese health authorities earlier this month.
The Trump administration called on Congress Monday for $2.5 billion in emergency funding to help combat the global outbreak — an amount that Democrats and Republicans alike said was too small to make the impact necessary.
On Tuesday, Schumer – echoing statements from Pelosi and 2020 candidates – branded the White House's efforts "too little, too late" and made his own request to add an extra $6 billion of entirely new funding to the administration's initial sum.
In response to Schumer's request, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., wrote Thursday that "everyone from [Schumer's] fellow Democrats to President Trump have seemed perplexed by [his] political game-playing" and that he felt "confident that the coronavirus does not care about partisan bickering or political news cycles."
In a joint statement released just a few minutes after McConnell's, Pelosi and Schumer wrote that while they "stand ready to work in a bipartisan fashion" because "lives are at stake," funding must be entirely new and the president "cannot transfer these new funds to anything other than coronavirus and fighting infectious diseases."
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"I was struck by how political it has become. You wonder whether we [if we had] another 9/11 people would be as politicized as this," Henninger told host Sandra Smith.
"But, nonetheless, this is going to be a challenge to both President Trump...to handle a crisis like this, but as well to Bernie Sanders," he stated, arguing that the socialist senator must explain why a government-run health care system would be better equipped to deal with such an outbreak.
Fox News' Chad Pergram, Brie Stimson, and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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