Trump told America’s governors they were on their own. So Maryland’s Larry Hogan is taking charge.
Larry Hogan has got another of his ideas, and this one cracks him up. “I’m gonna call Pence!” says Hogan, startling his chief of staff, Matthew Clark, who sits across a large, round faux-wood table. Hogan, the Republican governor of Maryland, is meeting with his coronavirus command team, a skeleton crew of state officials still reporting to the capitol in Annapolis.
The cooperation has been crucial. Governors will tell you they’re always the officials whose leadership most directly affects people’s lives. But that’s been truer than ever in the current crisis, as Trump has been more occupied with defending his performance and casting blame than with mounting the kind of coordinated national effort that other countries’ leaders have orchestrated.
At 1 P.M., Hogan settles back at the table for today’s governors-only teleconference. Forty-four governors have dialed in to the call, the 16th Hogan has convened since the start of the pandemic. “My question is, for those who received the Abbott machines, we received 15, but we only received 120 cartridges and/or kits we could actually test with,” says Andy Beshear, the governor of Kentucky.
These calls have been a lifeline for the governors, their principal source of unfiltered information and advice from their colleagues in the trenches of the battle against the virus. “The NGA’s never been as important as it is now, probably in decades, if not ever,” Cuomo says. The governors have been thrust into a no-win situation by the federal government, he says, making it all the more important that they stick together.
When Hogan sought the governorship in 2014, he cast himself as a fiscally focused uniter who would cut taxes and forswear social issues. But Maryland was trending so blue that the forecaster Nate Silver gave Hogan a less than 10% chance of victory. “This is a guy nobody thought had a chance to win, but I could just tell he had real skills,” says Hogan’s friend Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor.
Hogan’s testing coup angered Trump. “He didn’t understand too much about what was going on,” Trump said of Hogan on April 20. Hogan says Washington followed up by sending him a list of laboratories in his state, none of which had coronavirus tests on hand. Most were federal government labs the state couldn’t even access. Hence the appeal to Pence.
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