White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham reacted Wednesday to statements made by President Donald Trump Tuesday that he hopes to see America “opened up and just raring to go by Easter.” She said the experts appointed to the coronavirus task force might not have been “well-informed” when it came to the deadline.
“I don’t know how well-informed they were,” Grisham said when Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade asked, “How real is this Easter date and how well-informed was the rest of the task force that the president was going to say that yesterday, that his goal was to open up by Easter?”
She went on to say that Trump “is very hopeful” and wants to give Americans who are out of work or isolating at home a message of hope, too.
“It’s tough and I imagine a lot of people want to try to get out there and get back to work, as long as they are social distancing, so we’ll see what happens once the 15 days goes past and we’ve got new data sets,” she said.
Tuesday, a few hours after the president made the Easter proclamation during a Fox News town hall, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, a public face of the task force, cautioned against being too rigid with the date. Instead, he said the timeline “is really very flexible.”
“We just had a conversation with the president in the Oval Office talking about, you know, ‘You can look at a date but you’ve got to be very flexible.’ On a — literally — day-by-day and week-by-week basis, you need to evaluate the feasibility of what you’re trying to do,” he said.