It appeared that Trump decided to move forward with plans for reopening the economy on May 1st without input from the so-called 'Committee for Reopening the Economy' and without the committee even holding a single meeting yet, but now it looks like the committee will literally never meet.
The committee will never meet because the committee has been canceled.
Trump named several of his top advisers including Larry Kudlow and his chief of staff Mark Meadows to the committee just two days ago, but Bloomberg reports that Trump has abandoned the committee in favor of a different approach.
Trump reportedly plans to convene a business roundtable of some description that includes a wide range of participants including some that Trump named without their advance knowledge.
Several of the companies and other participants said they found out they were invited only after Trump announced their names in a Rose Garden news conference or from a White House statement later Tuesday. They said they didn’t know the format or the purpose of the calls, and some expressed doubt the exercise would be productive. [...]
Planning for the calls appeared to be as improvisational. People familiar with the matter said that multiple senior aides and White House offices were involved -- particularly Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and his associates. Trump himself pushed to expand participation, expressing a desire for titans of industry to advise him, one of the people said.
White House officials were unable to describe how the various industry groups would operate beyond Wednesday’s conference calls.
So, what do we have here?
It looks like Trump either got bored of his 'Committee for Reopening the Economy' after just two days or he did not like the way its members were received in the press and public. From that point, he decided to take matters into his own hands by calling up a bunch of CEOs to shoot the shit with them.
The other possibility is that this is part of the plan to shield Trump from personal consequences if reopening the economy too quickly leads to a second outbreak. Citing the advice of committee appointed by Trump would leave him more vulnerable than whatever this leads to.
If this does lead to a second outbreak, Trump is going to find that the likes of Tim Cook and Jamie Dimon have much better press shops than he does.