President Trump has apparently had a major change of heart on New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio based on their work together confronting the coronavirus.
The president said Friday he’s “really gotten to like” the Big Apple's mayor, adding they bonded while responding to the coronavirus outbreak.
“He’s like us, he’s working very hard. But I can’t say anything bad about Mayor de Blasio because my relationship with him over the last couple of weeks has been excellent,” Trump told reporters at a White House press conference.
“We’ve helped him, I think, a lot, and I’ve really gotten to like him. I get along with him very well. Now, he wants us to do certain things, and we’ve produced. Today I spoke with him with the Secretary of Defense Esper and we had a great conversation and we’re helping him get some of the things he needs.”
Trump said that he didn’t know de Blasio well before the crisis, and that they have discussed how the crisis is impacting his childhood neighborhood in Queens, where a huge bulk of the city's virus cases have emerged.
“I’ve spoken to him a lot,” Trump said. “And we’ve really had incredibly productive discussions. I’ve gotten him a lot of people, we’ve gotten him a medical center. He’s asked for at Elmhurst, I know Elmhurst hospital very well, that was an area of Queens that I grew up in, and boy you talk about an epicenter. That’s really the epicenter of the epicenter.
“That’s really something — we talked about it, as well as, you know, very close to where I grew up. And knowing it, being so familiar with it, it’s incredible to see where they have the trucks and I don’t have to go into great detail — refrigerated trucks coming up, I’ve never seen anything like it.
But Trump complained that two Democratic governors don’t appreciate his administration’s efforts to combat the coronavirus epidemic and said Vice President Mike Pence shouldn’t take their calls.
“I want them to be appreciative. I don’t want them to say things that aren’t true,” Trump said of the governors at a White House news conference Friday. “When they’re not appreciative to me, they’re not appreciative to the Army Corps. They’re not appreciative of FEMA,” he added, referring to the Corps of Engineers and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Trump told Pence, “You’re wasting your time” calling Governors Jay Inslee of Washington and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, whom Trump referred to as “the woman” from Michigan.
Both are Democrats. They have publicly complained they haven’t received adequate support from the federal government to fight virus outbreaks in their states.
Material from Bloomberg news service was used in this story.
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