Report: Trump Told Governors They Can Reopen Before May 1st

President Donald Trump speaks about the coronavirus in the Rose Garden of the White House, Tuesday, April 14, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

I recently took a trip to the grocery store — where I hadn’t been in a long while — and I was surprised to see no one practicing social distance.

Outside the store, markers kept waiting customers 6 feet apart. Yet, to enter the store, you had to walk in between a pair of supermarket employees — one on either side of the door. Therefore, in order to get in, you had to breeze past two people who were each three feet from you.

Inside, people appeared to pay no mind to proximity — they were walking and standing as closely as anyone normally would.

My conclusion: People are over it. Society can only hover strangely for so long. At some point, everybody wants to land and just get on with it.

On Thursday, folks ready to return to normalcy got some good news: According to The New York Times, in a conference call, the President told the nation’s governors they’re “going to call [their] own shots.”

Therefore, states’ executive leaders can open their states before May 1st if they choose.

Here’s what he reportedly said:

“You’re going to be calling the shots. We’ll be standing right alongside of you, and we’re going to get our country open and get it working. People want to get working.”

Previously, as noted by The Daily Wire, the Commander-in-Chief had set a date of April 30th. Yet, he’d declined to say whether a green light would be given at the end of the period.

As you may know, he’d also recently appeared to assert he has “total authority” over when things restart.

If so, the phone call Thursday signals a relinquishing of sorts.

As per the NYT article, he issued the following:

“Some of you are in very, very good shape to open quickly and, if you’d like, according to the guidelines, you could open before the date of May 1st.”

He also told governors they could take their time.

The Times relayed he’d be speaking Thursday evening about the specifics of reopening America:

The president will announce a plan in the works to drastically increase the capacity for state and local health departments to do core public health work like testing people, doing contact tracing,” an official told the Times. “We want to beef up state capacity to be able to perform core functions, so that if and when we start to open the country back up, we don’t have a resurgence of cases to require the country to shut back down.”

Major News Conference tonight, the White House at 6:00 P.M. (Eastern), to explain Guidelines for OPENING UP AMERICA AGAIN!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 16, 2020

Sounds good.

In my opinion, the governors are rightfully in charge here. I generally prefer a “states’ rights “approach to any given issue; but aside from that, every state is in a different place with this. South Dakota, for example — as smartly pointed out last week by Gov. Kristi Noem — is not New York City.