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Vice President Mike Pence has blocked the country's top public health officials from appearing on CNN over the last week in an effort to pressure the cable news network to air President Donald Trump's White House coronavirus briefings in their entirety, CNN reported Thursday .

CNN is one of several networks that often cut away from the briefings to fact-check the president's statements and don't always air the full events, which can last a few hours. Trump regularly makes false or misleading claims about the pandemic in the briefing room.

"When you guys cover the briefings with the health officials then you can expect them back on your air," a spokesperson for Pence told CNN.

CNN reported those officials include coronavirus task force members Drs. Deborah Birx, Anthony Fauci, FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn, and Surgeon General Jerome Adams. The president has also refused all of the network's requests for an interview during the health crisis.

On Tuesday, CNN didn't air the president's portion of the daily briefing, but tuned in for some of the health officials' remarks. The president's favorite network, Fox News, has aired the briefings in full.

Many critics have argued that the daily events often bear more resemblance to campaign rallies than informational briefings.

Trump has invited some top donors in the business world, who are helping produce essential medical supplies, to promote their companies and praise him. Last week, My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell celebrated the president, saying, "God gave us grace on November 8, 2016, to change the course we were on."

NOW WATCH: A law professor weighs in on how Trump could beat impeachment

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SEE ALSO: Colorado Gov. Jared Polis is optimistic his state may be able to get back to work at the end of April despite experts' warnings about a coronavirus resurgence

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Mike Pence is reportedly blocking health officials from going on CNN to pressure the network to air Trump's full coronavirus briefings - Pulse Nigeria

A cardiologist on Monday called for President Donald Trump to cease all in-person contact with Vice President Mike Penceand be placed basically on lockdown during the coronavirus pandemic.

Dr.Jonathan Reiner, who treatedformer Vice President Dick Cheney, told CNN anchor Erin Burnett that British Prime Minister Boris Johnsons admission to an intensive care unit after his symptoms worsened due to the virus was a terrible cautionary tale.

When I watch our leadership do these daily press conferences, I worry for their safety, Reiner said. This shows anyone can be infected with the virus, and I just dont think that our leadership here is taking this seriously enough for their own safety.I worry about the safety of the president and vice president.

Reiner recalled how former President George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney were never together in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks because the concern was that the enemy could deliver what would be called a decapitating attack and kill the leadership of this country.

Well, this is an enemy that can do the same thing. So why would you have the president and vice president together frequently when one can infect the other? The president should be basically on lockdown, he said, noting that Trump is 73 and therefore, due to his age, at high risk of dying from this virus.

So I think that for the sake our leadership, there really needs to be very, very limited, physical access to the president of the United States, Reiner added.

Check out the interview here:

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Cardiologist Explains Why Donald Trump And Mike Pence Shouldn't Be Together Right Now - HuffPost

Vice President Mike Pence was put in an awkward position this week when ABCs Byron Pitts asked if he speaks with God about deaths caused by the Trump administrations response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The Nightline co-host prefaced his question Wednesday evening by claiming that he was not being political.

I have a final question for you, Mr. Pitts said, NewsBusters reported. I ask this not in a political way, but for you, sir, like so many of us in our nation, are you a person of deep faith. No one doubts that. When you talk to God in your moments alone, do you find yourself worrying at all that people you represent and care deeply about have died and will die who did not need to because of steps the federal government did not take soon enough?

Mr. Pence paused and collected himself before answering.

Well, thank you for mentioning that we are talking about one American at a time and I promise you, thats the way President Trump thinks of this, its the way I think of it, he replied. We wanted the American people to see the numbers so that we understand the challenging days that lie ahead, but I want people to know that our future is in your hands, that if every one of us will do and put into practice the Guidelines for America that we can bring those numbers down.

The vice president added that America will get through this and well come out stronger than ever before.

The Trump administration has repeatedly rejected the premise that it did not take the contagion, which originated in China, seriously as it spread around the globe.

Officials have cited at least 56 key decisions it made at the pandemics outset that saved American lives.

Some include:

The only thing we werent prepared for was the media, Mr. Trump recently said when asked a question on coronavirus preparedness by NBC News White House correspondent Kristen Welker. The media has not treated it fairly. Ill tell you how prepared I was: I called for a ban for people coming in from China long before anybody. It was your network, I believe they called me a racist because I did that.

Read more:
Mike Pence asked if he talks to God about coronavirus deaths caused by slow federal response - Washington Times

Republicans are moving quickly to potentially jam Democrats into accepting an extension of small business programs without addressing other Democratic priorities. A spokesman for Schumer said theres been no negotiations thus far with Schumer and Small Business Committee ranking member Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.).

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he's spoken to all four House and Senate party leaders about sending $250 billion to the program. And McConnell said he intends to pass new relief as soon as Thursday without a roll call vote.

"It is quickly becoming clear that Congress will need to provide more funding or this crucial program may run dry. That cannot happen," McConnell said. Congress needs to act with speed and total focus to provide more money for this uncontroversial bipartisan program.

House Democratic leaders initially expressed private opposition to the idea. They have been resistant to piecemeal extensions and want additional money for state and local governments and an expansion of unemployment benefits for several more months, according to those sources.

But Pelosi seemed open to the idea Tuesday afternoon, saying in an interview on CNN that it was clear the small business program needs more funds immediately. But the speaker, who spoke to Mnuchin earlier Tuesday, said there would have to be "considerations" to ensure that women and minority-owned businesses had equal access to the funds.

"We want to make sure that the program is administered in a way that does not solidify inequality in how people have access to capital but instead [is a] benefit to everyone who qualifies for it," Pelosi said on CNN.

Still, Democrats complained they were blindsided by Sen. Marco Rubios (R-Fla.) tweets about fast action and McConnell's statements about spending hundreds of billions of new dollars with two days' notice. A spokesman for Schumer said the Democratic leader had not spoken to McConnell before the announcement, and that Rubio had not spoken to Cardin.

"I was a little taken aback that Sen. McConnell made this announcement without talking to Sen. Schumer or anyone else on the Democratic side of the aisle," said Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.) on Tuesday afternoon in an interview. "Just to announce that youre going to do something is not the right approach. But I think everybody would support trying to do something for small business."

With the Senates pro forma session scheduled for Thursday and the House scheduled for a Friday session, the Senate has an advantage simply on timing.

Still, House Democrats felt jammed by McConnells Senate majority on the $2 trillion phase three bill in March and may look darkly on an attempt to one-up them again. Its also possible that a single House member could object to passing the extension via voice vote and demand lawmakers fly back to Washington to vote in person, something congressional leaders desperately want to avoid.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who tried and failed to require House members to take a recorded vote on the massive $2 trillion emergency package two weeks ago, re-upped on Tuesday one of his earlier tweets on the constitutional requirements for a House quorum.

Similarly, a single senator could fight the plans. But one leading conservative, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), would not fight a clean extension of the small business program, according to a person familiar with his thinking. Another conservative senator that sometimes objects to speedy passage of new spending, Rand Paul (R-Ky.), did not have an immediate comment.

And without quick action, Rubio warned that fear would wrack small businesses that are applying for the oversubscribed program.

We have days, NOT weeks to address this, Rubio said on Twitter.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said that the House move quickly to approve the bill after Senate package "and provide confidence to small businesses across the country that their government will be there for them."

Pelosi made clear Tuesday that she considers Mnuchin's request an "interim package" and still plans to pursue another massive legislative package that would expanded unemployment benefits, include another round of direct cash payments and increase funding for state and local governments.

The small business program is popular and may actually be able to be extended without a roll call vote. That would defer debate on other ideas, from Schumers proposed pay bumps to grocery clerks and other essential employees to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) rehiring program for idled workers to President Donald Trumps $2 trillion infrastructure proposal.

And the Trump administration will get to hash out the unfolding crisis and the congressional response as the week unfolds. House Democrats will receive a coronavirus briefing from Vice President Mike Pence and other top officials on Wednesday, a rare moment of bipartisanship between the House majority and an administration it is often battling.

The briefing will be conducted via conference call and will last about 45 minutes, according to an invitation obtained by POLITICO. In addition to Pence, other key officials leading the coronavirus response will join, including Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx and Rear Adm. John Polowczyk.

Pence spokeswoman Katie Miller tweeted that the vice president would also do calls with House Republicans, Senate Democrats and Senate Republicans on Thursday. Senate Republicans also spoke to Fauci and Mnuchin last week in a conference call.

A major topic of the briefing is expected to be efforts by federal officials to deliver desperately needed personal protective equipment to states whose hospitals are being crushed by an influx of coronavirus patients.

In a conference call with reporters on Tuesday, senior administration officials said they are working with the private sector to ship millions and millions of masks from countries in Asia to address the mask deficiency and working with private companies to increase domestic productions. They also said they expected the United States would be able to deliver 100,000 new ventilators in the next 100 days and that testing has increased in the past four weeks from 2,500 tests a day to 125,000 tests a day.

Polowczyk has been leading the effort at the federal level, coordinating a fleet of cargo planes to bring face masks, gowns, gloves and ventilators from overseas to help replenish rapidly depleting U.S. supplies. But the overall effort has been beset by bureaucratic roadblocks, miscommunication and charges of political favoritism by state leaders.

House Democratic Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) has been hosting near-daily calls during the week in an effort to keep members informed and connected as Congress is out of session for an extended period to prevent the spread of the virus on Capitol Hill.

On a caucus call Monday that featured former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, Pelosi said the next coronavirus relief bill could easily cost more than $1 trillion.

Pelosi wants to begin working on a new more comprehensive bill immediately and is still talking as if the House could come back into session later this month to vote on it, although many lawmakers are increasingly saying they think thats untenable given the continued spread of the virus across the country.

The California Democrat has also met resistance from some top Republicans, who want to wait, as multiple federal and state agencies are already struggling to implement the policies Congress just passed.

Link:
$350B wasn't enough, Congress says, racing to send billions more to small businesses - POLITICO

President Donald Trump in the White House press briefing room on Friday.

Win McNamee/Getty Images

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There is nothing Donald Trump loves more than a rally. Its where he gets to hear hordes of people screaming his name in ecstasy, where he gets to call for the downfall of his enemies, and where he gets to talk, uninterrupted, for hours at a time about any passing thought he chooses. He loves his rallies so much hes done 96 of them since being elected president. The rally is perhaps the only place Donald Trump is truly happy. Or at least, it was.

In mid-March, however, with the coronavirus spreading ever more rapidly, Trump reluctantly announced that hed be canceling his campaign rallies for the foreseeable future, depriving himself of the closest thing our president has to a sanctuary. To make matters worse, Trumps sole source of self-soothing was being ripped from him by the thing he hates more than anything: his job. The country was being ravaged by a pandemic that he was in charge of containing, and a failure to do so could be catastrophic to his reelection chances.

Trumps second instincthis first instinct having been to pretend the outbreak wasnt happening and to tell people the virus would go awaywas to find someone else to take responsibility. And so, just as things were beginning to get too bad to ignore, Trump appointed Mike Pence to lead the White House Coronavirus Task Force.

Not only would his vice president happily obey orders, but any blame for the administrations response efforts could easily be offloaded on Pence and away from Trump. As NBC reported, Trump thought being the public face of the daily White House briefings on the pandemic would come with an onslaught of criticism, people familiar with the matter said.

Then Trump saw how much attention the vice president was receiving, and he decided to start regularly leading the televised daily updates himself. Since March 9, Trump has held 27 coronavirus task force briefings.

And, at least according to any metric Trump cares about, its paying off. Every day he gets to fill airtime across multiple networks, find new reasons to stoke outrage at the national media among his base, and receive some of the best coverage of his presidency. There is nothing a talking head loves more than a president looking stern-faced in a crisis, and Trump has been more than happy to oblige.

Trump at the coronavirus briefing on Monday.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

In a recent article titled Trump Literally Laughed at How He Can Game the Press With His New Tone, the Daily Beast reported that Trumps somber pivot was very much by design:

And over the past three years, the president has periodically remarkedsometimes with a self-aware chuckle or smirkabout how easy it is for him to trigger praise from a typically adversarial press simply by acting nice during a particularly weighty moment.

Its so easy, can you believe it? the president said during a dinner at the White House in early 2017, according to a source who was in the room at the time. All I had to do was be a little nice and do something beautiful [and now theyre] saying all these terrific things about Trump.

Its certainly been paying off. In one CNN segment from mid-March, Dana Bash had nothing but praise for the president.

From the clip:

If you look at the big picture, this was remarkable from the president of the United States. This is a nonpartisanthis is an important thing to note and to applaud from an American standpoint and from a human standpoint. He is being the kind of leader that people need at least in tone today and yesterday, in tone that people need and want and yearned for in times of crisis and uncertainty.

Just a week before, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had stopped holding its own coronavirus briefings because the White Houses task force kept elbowing in to hold their own last-minute pressers. These, led by a failed meat salesman and a man who allowed Indianas HIV crisis to flourish, were naturally given precedence.

While Trump allows medical professionals and other featured players to participate on a rotating basis, everyone knows that Trump is the star. He leads the briefings, he fields the questions (even going so far as to prevent Anthony Fauci from providing answers that might embarrass him), and he gets the praise he craves. While he may be delighted to receive positive, or even respectfully mixed, reviews from the same reporters he publicly excoriates, hes also managed to turn the events themselves into a daily worship session.

By now, everyone knows that the best way and perhaps only way to get Trumps cooperation is to slather him in praise. The sincerity of the compliment makes no difference; all that matters is that its effusive. Three years in, the few government officials who remain are happy to obligeand with millions of lives hanging in the balance, even would-be independent public health experts will do whatever it takes to keep the president from derailing their efforts in a burst of pique.

The result is a daily ritual where, quite literally, the first priority of all the pandemic responders is the boosting of the presidents ego. In poring over Trumps briefings from the past month for the fits of sycophancy anyone who wishes to speak seems required to perform, I found myself with nearly an hour of pure bootlicking. To spare you at least some of the secondhand embarrassment, I trimmed it down to just over three minutes:

Occasionally, truly critical information will be sandwiched between calls to recognize Trump as the one true king. Often, though, each days dose of meaningful new information or policy could have been tossed out in a press release. None of that affects the length or pacing of the show, though, because more than anything these briefings exist simply to fill that cavernous void in Trumps soul where his rallies used to go.

He often speaks for over an hour, rambling his way through a stream of consciousness in the sort of stand-up comedy cadence his rallygoers know and love. Hell take questions from Jim Acosta, giving him an opportunity for some performative media-bashing in the moment and some Twitter material for later. Hell listen to officials prostrate themselves, visibly basking in the warm glow of their stilted praise.

Its not all fun, of course. As much as his media bashing is a performance, he also genuinely despises being questionedespecially when the questions are about unpleasant concrete facts such as the countrys inability to test for the disease as he promised it would, or the chronic failure to deliver masks, ventilators, and other critical gear. Hell often have a tantrum or two, occasionally storming out if things get really bad. For the most part, though, this is the best part of Trumps day.

Meanwhile, Pence, the actual head of the task force, is little more than an afterthought. In a randomly chosen period of seven episodes, Donald Trump overwhelmed his chosen coronavirus leader in speaking time:

Slate

I chose not to include the time Trump spent leaning in to interrupt someone elses podium time, because it felt cruel.

Mike Pence, for his part, knows perfectly well what this is. Over the course of Trumps presidency, Mike Pence has been more than happy to do his bosss bidding, often humiliating himself in the process. And he knows that if he wants to keep his spot in the presidents good graces, he has to perform subservience to an astonishing degree.

If you watch the briefings back to back, one of the things that most stands out is Pences constant crediting of Trump. He refuses to even so much as begin to intimate that he himself might have had some say in anything thats happening related to the task force he leads. Over the course of the week I surveyed, Pence said some variation of as the president said or as the president likes to say or at the presidents direction no less than 38 times in his less than an hour of speaking time.

In fact, Mike Pences brief moments in the spotlight seem to be almost exclusively for the purpose of reminding everyone that hes little more than a go-between. He discusses the task force now and then, but everything eventually always comes back to Trump.

During that same period of seven days, Pences references to Trump beat references to the coronavirus currently ravaging the country at a ratio of roughly 5 to 3.

Slate

Still, despite these displays being largely for and about Trump, people are desperate for information and will continue to tune in. Its the largest, most captive audience Trump has ever had. He may lack the immediate feedback loop of a rally, but hes found a more than adequate replacement in the daily parade of government officials describing the various ways in which theyd die for him. The daily presser has largely stopped being even remotely useful, but like his rallies, now that he has it, its hard to see why hed ever give it up.

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Trump Is the Star of the Coronavirus Show, and Hes Loving Every Minute of It - Slate