Senior Republicans break ranks with president

NEW YORK • US President Donald Trump's failure to contain the coronavirus outbreak and his refusal to promote clear public health guidelines have left many senior Republicans despairing that he will ever play a constructive role in addressing the crisis.

Some of them have concluded that they must work around Mr Trump and ignore or even contradict his pronouncements.

In recent days, several of the most prominent figures in the Republican party outside the White House have broken ranks with Mr Trump over issues such as the value of wearing a mask in public and heeding the advice of health experts such as Dr Anthony Fauci, who the President and other hard-right figures within the administration have subjected to caustic personal criticism.

They appear to be spurred by several overlapping forces, including deteriorating conditions in their own states, Mr Trump's seeming indifference to the problem and the approach of the Nov 3 presidential election in which Mr Trump is badly lagging his Democratic challenger Joe Biden in the polls.

Once-reticent Republican governors are now issuing orders on mask-wearing and business restrictions that run counter to Mr Trump's demands.

Some of these governors have been holding late-night phone calls among themselves to trade ideas and grievances; they have sought out partners in the administration other than the President, including Vice-President Mike Pence, who, despite echoing Mr Trump in public, is seen by governors as far more attentive to the continuing disaster.

"The President got bored with it," Mr David Carney, an adviser to Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, said of the pandemic.

A handful of Republican lawmakers in the Senate have privately pressed the administration to bring back health briefings led by figures such as Dr Fauci and Dr Deborah Birx, who regularly updated the public during the spring until Mr Trump upstaged them with his own briefing-room monologues.

And in the state of Kentucky last week, Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, broke with Mr Trump on nearly every major issue related to Covid-19.

"The straight talk here that everyone needs to understand is: This is not going away until we get a vaccine," Mr McConnell said on Wednesday, contradicting Mr Trump's rosy predictions.

The result is a quiet but widening breach between Mr Trump and leading figures in his party, as the virus burns through major political battlegrounds in the south and the west, such as in the states of Arizona, Texas and Georgia.

The emerging rifts in Mr Trump's party have been slow to develop, but they have rapidly deepened since a new surge in coronavirus cases began to sweep the country last month.

In the final days of last month, Utah Governor Gary Herbert, a Republican, joined other governors on a conference call with Mr Pence and urged the administration to do more to combat a sense of "complacency" about the virus. Mr Herbert said it would help states like his own if Mr Trump and Mr Pence were to encourage mask-wearing on a national scale, according to a recording of the call.

Mr Pence told Mr Herbert that the suggestion was "duly noted", and said that mask-wearing would be a "very consistent message" from the administration.

In a Fox interview that was broadcast on Sunday, Mr Trump said he would not issue a national mask order because Americans deserve "a certain freedom" on the matter.

Some of the states where outbreaks have worsened most in recent weeks are led by Republicans who spent months avoiding stringent lockdowns, in some cases because state leaders were uneasy about creating space between themselves and a president of their own party who rejected such steps.

That dynamic has been particularly pronounced in southern states such as Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, where governors have either continued to resist tough public health restrictions or have only recently and partially embraced them.

NYTIMES