Previously, President Donald Trump announced he was putting together a bipartisan congressional task force. The task force involved nearly every Republican Senator, except Mitt Romney.
The White House released a list of lawmakers from both political parties who will be involved in the task force that will be reopening the country and its economy when the social restrictions are lifted, ideally by the end of April. From the Republicans, only Utah Senator Mitt Romney was not included in the list. Trump later confirmed Romney’s exclusion from the list and confirmed that it was out of the personal grudge he holds for the Utah Senator.
Trump confirmed that he still holds a grudge against Romney. During the Sunday White House briefing, the President went on to reiterate this grudge. “I’m not a fan of Mitt Romney. I don’t really want his advice.”
Their frayed relationship stems all the way back in 2016 when Trump attacked Romney by saying that he was “one of the dumbest and worst candidates” in the party’s history, following Romney’s criticism of Trump. The two have since not seen eye to eye especially when Romney joined the Senate in 2019. Romney is also the sole Republican who voted to impeach Trump during the trials for one of two counts; abuse of power.
Aside from Romney, over two dozen Democrat lawmakers were also not included in the list, such as Senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Doug Jones, Joe Manchin, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
At the same time, Trump has been clashing with the Democrat state governors in the daily White House briefings. Several state governors have asked for help due to the shortage of supplies and materials needed for testing potential coronavirus cases. Trump claimed that the healthcare facilities have been testing millions of Americans every day, even when the actual number is much lower at 150,000 daily.
Trump also lashed out at the governors with some of his previous statements claiming that as president, he has total control of when to reopen the states. The US Constitution states that only the state governors have that power, not the federal government. He continued to lash out at the governors again, following their requests for the federal government to perform testing.
“The governors wanted to have total control over the opening of their states, but now they want to have us, the federal government, do the testing,” said Trump. “Testing is local, you can’t have it both ways…”