For governors, the coronavirus is a test, from its deadly toll to dealing with Trump

For governors, too, the coronavirus has been a test.

They find themselves rallying an anxious public, bidding against one another for scarce ventilators on the open market and sometimes scrapping with the president over what the federal government should and has delivered.

More than any other elected official, governors have been making the on-the-ground decisions that will determine the lives and, in some cases, the deaths of Americans during this pandemic. They are responsible for deciding when stay-at-home orders are issued to slow the spread of COVID-19 and have scrambled to try to ensure adequate medical treatment is going to be available when it does spread.

That has put them in a national spotlight that has burnished the reputations of some – Mike DeWine of Ohio, Larry Hogan of Maryland, Gavin Newsom of California, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan – and subjected others to caustic scrutiny. Some have found themselves both praised and pilloried.

Whitmer, elected governor in 2018, has been surprised by the limits of the federal role in the crisis.

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"COVID-19 doesn't respect state boundaries; it doesn't observe partisan lines," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. "Having a more cohesive national strategy, I think, is something that I would have expected, and that [lack] is creating a unique challenge for us to get our arms around COVID-19."

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In responding to crises from hurricanes to mass shootings, governors are typically important figures, but they have become more central in this one because the president has chosen not to exert all the authority he could.

Trump hasn't imposed a national shutdown order, leaving a patchwork of regulations across the country. He has only reluctantly and narrowly triggered the Defense Production Act that would order companies to produce scarce materials. The federal government hasn't taken charge of the medical supply chain despite pleas from governors in both parties to take control of procurement and distribution.

The step back is deliberate. Trump says he wants to give the states "flexibility" on whether to issue stay-at-home orders. Vice President Mike Pence, head of the White House coronavirus task force, has repeated a mantra that the administration's approach is "locally executed, state managed and federally supported."

The result: Never in modern times has any governor had to handle a bigger or more deadly crisis, one that is also stressing the global economy and straining the nation's health care system. More than 6,000 Americans have died, a number that doesn't yet show signs of leveling off, and a record 6.6 million Americans filed this week for unemployment insurance. 

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"Ninety days after I became governor, I was faced with the riots in Baltimore, where we called up 4,000 members of the National Guard and a thousand police officers," Hogan, who is also chair of the National Governors Association, said in an interview with USA TODAY. "This is like 10 times more than that every single day. It's like a hurricane hits all 50 states that keeps coming and keeps increasing intensity with each and every day."

He said some of the decisions being made – to close schools, shut down businesses, impose quarantines, erect emergency hospitals and blow up state budgets – would have been unimaginable only a month ago. 

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Is there a cost to candor?

One of the decisions: Whether to criticize Trump.

Governors who have publicly faulted the federal government for not delivering enough help or the right help have found themselves the target of the president's bully pulpit. Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, the first state to record a coronavirus outbreak and death, in an early tweet thanked Pence for his help but added that "our work would be more successful if the Trump administration stuck to the science and told the truth."

Trump then labeled Inslee "a snake" who was "not a good governor" and someone he would refuse to talk to, although Pence has continued to speak with him. Those exchanges have fueled fears in Washington State and elsewhere that a rhetorical breach could have a substantive impact – that is, could prompt federal agencies to punish a governor by sending less aid to his or her state.

"I'm praying that it doesn't," Inslee's predecessor, Christine Gregoire, said in an interview. The former two-term governor provides training sessions for new governors through the National Governors Association, a group she once headed, but she says she's never encountered this particular challenge before.

"I have to tell you," she said, "I can't remember one where the stakes were high, let alone a matter of life and death, where there's been public disagreements of this nature."

Governors have found themselves trying walk a fine line between expressing candor and protecting their state's interests.

"Maybe some of them are a little more critical than they probably should be, in my opinion, and some of them maybe don't speak up as much as they should," Hogan, a Republican, said of his fellow governors in an interview with USA TODAY. "But I just try to strike that balance of being respectful, not overly critical, but really clearly stating what the needs are."

Hogan pushed back this week when Trump said, inaccurately, that governors were no longer expressing concerns about a shortage of testing kits.

When the federal government sent 170 ventilators to Los Angeles County, none of them operational, Newsom said he simply located a Silicon Valley firm that could refurbish them. "I didn't call a press conference," the California governor said, although he did relate the experience in an interview on CNN Wednesday. "Not finger-pointing; not nail-biting." 

Newsom said his state, which has among the highest number of coronavirus patients in the country, doesn't expect to receive all the ventilators it needs from the federal stockpile and instead is competing with other states to buy them, a situation that has encouraged price-gouging. "It's the wild, wild West, no question about it."

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Wrath for 'a woman governor' who spoke out

Whitmer also has incurred Trump's wrath.

"All she does is sit there and blame the federal government," the president complained last week, referring to her as the "young, a woman governor" in Michigan, not mentioning her name.

Whitmer responded with a tweet that included a hand-waving emoji. "Hi, my name is Gretchen Whitmer, and that governor is me." In an appearance on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show with Trevor Noah," Whitmer sported a bright blue T-shirt that said, "That Woman from Michigan."

The president and the governor did finally speak on the phone Tuesday. "It was an unscheduled call," Whitmer said in the interview. "I had reached out and asked for a call and it didn't happen immediately, but ultimately it did."

She said she thanked him for a federal shipment of protective N95 masks from the Strategic National Stockpile but said much more were needed. "When we have one hospital system in Detroit that'll go through 12,000 masks in a shift, it tells you that 112,000 is helpful, but it's nowhere near solving the problem," she said.

She dismissed questions about the political implications of the crisis: "We all have to remember right now the enemy is COVID-19."

That said, Whitmer's political stock has risen. Former vice president Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, said this week that she had already been on his list of possible running mates.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's reputation has grown, too. His daily briefing from Albany has become a Democratic counterpoint to the White House briefing later each day presided over by President Trump. The governor's blunt, measured updates have even prompted speculation on social media that he would be a stronger presidential nominee than Biden, a notion the governor has rejected.

The coronavirus crisis could have a broader political impact as well. For one thing, it could counter the public's long-standing appetite for outsiders in political office.

At the moment, deep experience and an ability to direct the bureaucracy are seen as valued assets. Among the governors who have gotten the highest marks are those with long – and sometimes familial – records in politics. Cuomo and Hogan have not only been elected to multiple gubernatorial terms but also are both second-generation politicians. (Cuomo's father was a New York governor; Hogan's father was a Maryland congressman.) Ohio Gov. DeWine is a former lieutenant governor, state attorney general, U.S. representative and senator. 

The challenges for governors won't end when the coronavirus crisis eases. At that point, they'll be dealing with the pandemic's repercussions for the health system, for the economy and for budgets that in 49 states are mandated to be balanced. (The exception: Vermont.) 

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Spring break at the beach

The governors who have gotten the most criticism are those who have been slowest to act, calculating that the threat to their citizens didn't warrant ordering the most disruptive restrictions. 

Only a dozen governors, all of them Republicans, so far haven't issued statewide stay-at-home orders, a step that public health officials say is crucial to "flatten the curve," to reduce transmission of the virus to avoid overloading the health system. Those states are Alabama, Arkansas, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and Wyoming. (Some of those governors have ordered less far-reaching restrictions.)

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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose retiree-heavy population makes his state particularly susceptible to the disease, has been hammered for resisting calls to close down crowded beaches during spring break celebrations that drew thousands of young people. Trump had praised him as a "great governor" who "knows exactly what he's doing."

Once the president on Tuesday adopted a more somber tone and issued a sobering projected death toll, however, DeSantis did order a statewide shutdown for 30 days, starting Friday. He acted after the U.S. surgeon general, Dr. Jerome Adams, said on NBC's "Today" show that DeSantis should view the federal guidelines urging social distancing as "a national stay-at-home order."

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp also issued a statewide shelter-in-place order on Wednesday. At a news conference, he said he had just learned that people who showed no symptoms could be infected and pass on the virus. Public health experts had been warning about that fact since January, the fundamental reason they had been urging everyone to stay home.

“Well, we didn’t know that until the last 24 hours,” Kemp told reporters. “This is a game-changer for us."

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