WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump and the Coronavirus Task Force held a briefing Wednesday at the White House Rose Garden.
Trump mentioned it was “a big day today in the White House.”
“All of American society is engaged and mobilized in the war against the invisible enemy,” he said. “While we must remain vigilant, it is clear that our aggressive strategy is working, and very strongly working.
“The battle continues, but the data suggests that nationwide we have passed the peak on new cases. Hopefully that will continue, and we will continue to make great progress. These encouraging developments have put us in a very strong position to finalize guidelines for states on reopening the country, which we’ll be announcing. We’re going to be talking about that tomorrow. We’ll be having a news conference tomorrow. Sometime during the afternoon we’re going to be announcing guidelines, and we’ll be talking about various states, and it’s very exciting.”
Trump announced that he “spoke with the leaders of many of our nation’s most renowned companies and organizations on how to achieve the full resurgence of the American economy.”
His discussions on Wednesday included leaders in health and healthcare, transportation, technology, financial services, food, beverages, hospitality, real estate, retail, agriculture, construction, energy, labor, manufacturing and sports industries.
“We want to get our country open again,” Trump said. “We want to have our sports leagues open. You want to watch sports, it’s important. We miss sports, we miss everything. We want to get back.
“These experts and innovators provided extremely productive feedback on how to safely reboot our economy. They gave us a lot of great ideas. We spoke to a lot of very, very smart people. The highest of the high tech, the level of IQ on some of those calls was about the highest you’ve ever seen in a phone call. We have a lot of great thought went into those calls and a lot of questions came out and also statements, very strong statements, as to what they recommend. I think it was a great day. We did a lot of calling with a lot of very prominent people, but more importantly, very smart people and people that love our country.”
Trump mentioned that leaders “talked about the vital importance of our wide array of relief measures to address the present crisis.”
“They provided valuable insights on how to move forward, including on the role of protective gear where we have tremendous amounts of protective gear coming in, robust testing and the future use of therapies and treatments,” Trump said. “They also underscored the crucial importance of strong supply chains and communications infrastructure. We’re talking about infrastructure for the middle of our country.
“We’re talking about broadband and things that they frankly don’t have and haven’t had for a long time because a lot of politicians forgot about them. Can’t forget about them. They’re really the heart and soul — can’t forget about them.”