California Governor Gavin Newsom was informed by White House staff that he would have to personally request testing swabs from the federal government and personally thank him in order to secure the shipment of the vital coronavirus supplies, The New York Times reports.

In an story about how the White House repeatedly tried to push responsibility for responding to the spreading to the coronavirus to state and local leaders, a program the Administration labelled “state authority handoff,” the Times shines light onto the effort to avoid any culpability by Trump for the increasing case number and fatalities.

According to the reporting, the White House delusionally believed that the virus was disappearing in April, ignoring warnings from public health officials that the virus would rebound if reopening wasn’t done with sufficient caution.

Dr. Deborah Birx, the only public health official advising White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, was persistently giving Meadows upbeat information about the coronavirus–information that only painted a partial picture of the pandemic and was not verified through other sources.

Reliant on model-based data, Birx could not account for the rush to reopening encouraged by Trump and republicans, an action that led to spikes in coronavirus cases in those states like Florida and Texas that did not follow CDC guidelines.

More tellingly, many of the decisions made about federal policy and reopenings were done by White House staff members who were not part of the task force or briefed on public health issues.

The White House did not recognize their errors for nearly two months, in June, when spike in traditional Red States made Trump concerned about his base of voters.  Only then did the rhetoric coming out of the Administration moderate to promote the use of masks and social distancing.

In April, for example, Trump predicted that the number of fatalities from the coronavirus would be substantially less than 100,000.  In June, the narrative changed, with Trump saying that people predicted millions dead–thereby moving the goalposts to make it appear his administration’s response was effective.

The United States currently has more than 140,000 fatalities attributed to the coronavirus, with case numbers and hospitalizations rising.