Trump wasn't the one who made anybody stay at home. He left those decisions up to each individual Governor. Trump demonstrated extreme restraint in not just grabbing power and making Americans do whatever he wanted. And people on the loft will still call him a "Fascist," while calling the Democrat Governors who won't let anybody go back to work or leave their homes, "Heroes."

Just remember that Trump declared “absolute authority” over the states when he was planning to impose restrictions. Then he was educated on the finer points of The Constitution and decided it would ultimately look better on him if he let the governors impose/relax restrictions. That way if things go wrong it will not be his fault. Never mind that he was encouraging protests against stay-at-home orders when conditions for opening that he was backing were not met.

BTW, Steven, the US is well past the 500 figure you thought would not be attained. And it ain’t anywhere near over yet.

Just remember that Trump declared “absolute authority” over the states when he was planning to impose restrictions. Then he was educated on the finer points of The Constitution and decided it would ultimately look better on him if he let the governors impose/relax restrictions. That way if things go wrong it will not be his fault. Never mind that he was encouraging protests against stay-at-home orders when conditions for opening that he was backing were not met.

BTW, Steven, the US is well past the 500 figure you thought would not be attained. And it ain’t anywhere near over yet.

trump is holding back on declaring a nationwide stay-at-home order, even as some governors resist imposing restrictions that Trump's top public health officials say are needed to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

The president has been reluctant to wade into matters he argues are better left to governors. But the pressure is growing for Trump to be decisive as Republican-led states like Texas, Iowa and Missouri are among the final holdouts to issue stay-at-home directives.

Lawrence Gostin, director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, said Trump may not have the legal authority to halt interstate travel or require governors to lock down a state. But the president has yet to fully use the power of his bully pulpit to encourage them to do so.

"What President Trump could do is send a much clearer signal that he wants all governors to do a lockdown on their states, to guide them about what that lockdown would require and what the standard should be," Gostin said.

The U.S. had more than 206,000 confirmed coronavirus cases as of Wednesday afternoon, and roughly 4,500 have died in the U.S. from the virus.

Administration officials have repeatedly stressed the best-case scenario — resulting in 100,000 to 240,000 deaths — will only be attained if Americans rigorously follow federal social distancing guidelines that urge people to stay at home when possible and keep a distance of 6 feet from others when outside.

But since roughly one-third of states have yet to issue statewide stay-at-home orders, there are questions about why the White House allows the patchwork approach to persist in lieu of a firmer national decree.

A former administration official familiar with the situation said the White House discussed the possibility of a national advisory in some form, but at the time the virus had yet to impact swaths of the country enough to warrant serious consideration.

Italy and India have both imposed nationwide lockdowns to try to contain the virus. Trump over the weekend floated a quarantine of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, but backed off amid questions over its legality and enforceability in favor of issuing a travel advisory.

Top U.S. health officials have been careful not to undercut the president and have acknowledged the difficulty some governors face in getting residents to heed something like a statewide lockdown. Instead, they have put the emphasis on federal social distancing guidelines that are in place at least through the end of April, suggesting those are the next best thing to a stay-at-home directive.

"My advice to America would be that these guidelines are a national stay at home order," Surgeon General Jerome Adams said Wednesday on NBC’s "Today" show. "They’re guidelines that say the more we social distance, the more we stay at home, the less spread of disease there will be."

Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, dodged a question about whether the federal government should ask every state to implement a stay-at-home order, telling NBC everybody should "strictly follow" federal guidelines.

And Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House coronavirus response, told reporters Tuesday that Trump and Vice President Pence "trust the American people to understand that they can be outside, take walks, be 6 feet away from anyone else and be in their homes, and we trust them to do that without having to lock down."

Governors across the country have largely taken the decision out of Trump's hands. More than 30 states have issued stay-at-home orders for residents. But the holdouts have mostly been red states, including some with large populations that could suffer without stronger mitigation measures.

The president has shown an unwillingness to lean on GOP Govs. Ron DeSantis of Florida or Greg Abbott of Texas to shut down their states, even though DeSantis on Tuesday explicitly said he would do so if the White House urged him to.

"Different kind of a state," Trump said Tuesday when asked about DeSantis's comments. "Also, great governor. He knows exactly what he’s doing. Has a very strong view on it. And we have spoken to Ron."

DeSantis gave in a day later, signing an order Wednesday urging residents to "limit movements and personal interactions outside the home."

The former administration official noted that Trump may be less inclined to push for a more uniform stay-at-home policy because the states without one at the moment are ones where he has strong political support. The president may be wary of triggering backlash among his base, the official suggested.

But the fact that the lack of action is coming from certain red states underscores why Trump should be more involved, Gostin argued.

"The truth is we’re only seeing fairly good social distancing in coastal states but not in southern states like Florida and in the Midwest," he said. "And it’s in those states that he has the most influence to encourage particular red-state governors to do a lockdown. And he could give them political cover to do it."

"He doesn’t have legal power," Gostin added. "But he has enormous influence, particularly in the South and the Midwest, to try to have a much more nationally uniform strategy rather than an utterly inconsistent patchwork across the country."

The consequences of further inaction from states like Texas in particular could be calamitous, experts warn. While states like Washington have seen some success in tamping down the number of coronavirus cases through aggressive social distancing measures, a patchwork system could leave other parts of the country vulnerable and overwhelm the health care system in the coming weeks and months.

"I think the real wild card here and the decision point on whether or not we’re going to have the bad outcome that Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx talked about is what populous states like Texas and Florida do that really haven’t taken aggressive steps even now," former Food and Drug Administration chief Scott Gottlieb said Wednesday morning on CNBC.

"They’re large states, they have large urban areas that have very dense populations. And if they don’t get more aggressive, then we could be on the cusp of some of those bad outcomes," he said.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/490666-trump-resists-pressure-to-declare-nationwide-stay-at-home-order

The problem I have with your line of thinking is that you selectively judge what Trump says as either serious or not, true or not, and you can only do that after the fact. As POTUS Trump needs to understand that he has a responsibility to ALWAYS be honest with the American public, but he is not.

He outright lies, even when trying to justify a comment. Just going back to his injection of disinfectant remarks, the following day he claimed he was simply being sarcastic to reporters and claimed he said it directly to a reporter who fired back that he wasn't even in the briefing that day.

You say the 'authority' comment was peacock posturing, which suggests you believe Trump was "joking." But I believe Trump honestly believed at that moment that he did have that authority. I suspect he was told later by his aides/legal team to drop that line of talk, and then a day or so later he said the governors had the authority.

I typed my last response on my phone and I see now I was opaque as to the subject of focus. I apologize. It was not my intent to defend the President per se, but to note the abject hipocracy of the media. Trump is, at all times, battling not just the pandemic, not just an opposition media, not just the prospect of a fallen economy, but also his own personality traits. The media, were they interested in helping America and Americans instead of taking down the President could do so and still find fault with Trump.

In the way media are focusing their attacks on Trump, it seems the media don’t want any optimism to be seen, at all. It’s entirely true Trump overstates his optimism, but the media can’t be bothered to write an article that reads ‘President Trump optimistic, maybe too much so’ which is a fair and accurate headline. No. The headlines are always ‘Trump preaching unwarranted optimism’ or ‘Despite lack of medical training, Trump says’. THAT is what I intended my focus to be.

Trump wasn't the one who made anybody stay at home. He left those decisions up to each individual Governor. Trump demonstrated extreme restraint in not just grabbing power and making Americans do whatever he wanted. And people on the loft will still call him a "Fascist," while calling the Democrat Governors who won't let anybody go back to work or leave their homes, "Heroes."

I think many people who were not supportive of Trump winning the presidency were at least open minded to the possibility that MAYBE his approach to governing would be different. I for one thought no one in their right mind would actually vote for Trump, but when he did win I was willing to give him a chance. I really thought he would have experienced people around him who would help him learn the ropes.

Of course, Trump was not interested in how things were done in the past (and I grant you that the people who supported him also did not want a repeat of the past; they were looking for a major shakeup), so he basically got rid of the Obama era holdovers and created his new cabinet of "nothing but the best" people. I have pointed out many times how these people were recruited as the best, then fired as being terrible and should never have been hired in the first place (by Trump, no less!).

That aside, Trump showed his colours from the very start, beginning with making Sean Spicer lie about crowd size. It was a trivial matter, of course, but it set the tone for everything that was to come. Trump's pattern of lying just continued incredulously, so no surprise that the media would pick up on that.

If Trump would have tried to be a uniter instead of a divider, if he would have been truthful from the start, if he would have worked with the Democrats instead of talking nasty to and about them, and if he had not started the "FAKE NEWS" nonsense, then I think he may have had a chance.

But Trump is a showman; any publicity is good publicity; he wanted to be in the news, and nonsense was a great way of getting attention. He lied, denied, blustered, bullshitted, bullied, grandstanded, etc with the intent of feeding his base "red meat," and he did it with gusto and very successfully. Unfortunately it not only closed but slammed the door on getting any positive publicity from the main stream media.

For me, Trump has revealed his true character often enough now that I can't take anything he says seriously. Even when he utters words of condolence to families who have lost loved ones the words ring hollow and insincere. His prepared speeches are delivered with a "my Mommy made me say this" tone, as compared to his bragging/blustering/boasting bravado demonstrated at rallies. He could turn 180 degrees and I would not likely believe that he is truly deep down a changed person. That -- and much more -- is what, IMHO, makes him unsuitable as POTUS.