Heilemann: If You Followed Trump’s Lead on Coronavirus Your State ‘Is a Catastrophe’

HEILEMANN: “Yeah. Good morning, Mika, how are you?”

BRZEZINSKI: “Good morning. Good.”

HEILEMANN: “It’s — I think — you know, there’s a lot to say about it. First of all, there’s a couple things. One is the kind of the substance of it and there’s the politics of it. I think on the substance, you know, the universal reaction, I think what Governor Hogan is expressing there is something that if you talk to governors, Democrat or Republican, I think over the course of the pandemic, I was trying to count this up yesterday in my head, I think I maybe have talked to 12 or 13 governors, some Democrats, some Republicans over the course of the last few months while this has all been unfolding, and it’s been unanimous. Democrats and Republicans, doesn’t matter what party you’re in, they’ve all expressed the same sentiments that Governor Hogan did, only they’ve expressed them in private. There had been incredible frustration with the lack of leadership, with the Trump Administration, and the sense, that dawning sense early on that the governors were on their own. President Trump occasionally would say, would try to basically say, ‘I’m in charge, I have all the power.’ And then the next day, when it looked like it was easier to shift the blame to governors, he was like, ‘No, no, no, it’s all up to the states.’ So the governors got the message early, and I think the interesting question is that you saw — this was not strictly on party lines. You saw governors like Governor Hogan, Governor DeWine, Governor Baker in Massachusetts, three Republicans, who basically said, ‘You know, we’re going to quietly go off and get done what we need to get done, we won’t follow Donald Trump’s lead,’ and they’ve basically did a pretty good job for their states, Maryland, Ohio and Massachusetts. And then a lot of Democratic governors obviously did the same thing. And then you have these other Republican governors, one of them you mentioned earlier, Governor Kemp, Governor DeSantis, Governor Abbott, Governor Ducey, in Florida, Texas and Arizona in that order, who all basically decided, ‘You know, even though Trump is not helping us, we’re going to take or cues from President Trump in terms of what we’re going to do on policy,’ and you see the scale of the disaster now in those four states, in Georgia, Texas, Florida, and Arizona. That’s been the dividing line. They’ve all been basically on their own and have been left to make a choice: ‘Do I follow the President’s lead without his real help or do I not follow the President’s lead without his real help?’ And the clear — right now, the verdict is in. If you decided to follow President Trump’s lead, your state right now is a catastrophe. If you decided to go on your own and not follow his lead, just do what was the right thing for your citizens, your state is in a pretty decent place. And I think there’s going to be some lessons, or there should be some lessons, if anybody has a brain in their head in the Republican Party, about how that has played out. If you’re paying attention to the reality here, both on the politics and the public policy, that message is pretty clear at this point about what the right thing to do going forward is. We’ll see if these Republican governors get that message.”