President Trump announced today that he will be holding a press conference at 3PM this afternoon:
I will be having a news conference today at 3:00 P.M., The White House. Topic: CoronaVirus!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 13, 2020
According to the NY Times and other sources, Trump will declare a national emergency:
President Trump is expected to declare a national emergency on Friday afternoon, a move that would give him authority to use $40 billion of funds allocated by Congress for disaster relief to address the coronavirus crisis.
Mr. Trump, according to a senior administration official, is expected to invoke the Stafford Act, a law that empowers the Federal Emergency Management Agency to coordinate disaster response and aid state and local governments.
The president had indicated in recent days that he had been briefed the law and could use it to address the pandemic, and Democratic lawmakers like Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, have been pressing him to invoke it.
“We have very strong emergency powers under the Stafford Act,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday. “I have it memorized, practically, as to the powers in that act. And if I need to do something, I’ll do it. I have the right to do a lot of things that people don’t even know about.”
Still, the details of Mr. Trump’s announcement, another official cautioned, were in flux and being finalized ahead of a 3 p.m. news conference that Mr. Trump announced on Twitter Friday morning.
The last time Trump declared a national emergency was to use pentagon and other funding to build the border wall. Democrats and the media lost their minds while activist groups sued Trump in court. I’m guessing that they won’t have a problem with this national emergency to combat the coronavirus.