Trump faces ?black swan? threat to the economy and reelection

And travel bans expanded as leaders confronted the nightmarish prospect of a spreading virus swallowing their nations.President Donald Trump’s top aides faced an increasingly urgent threat Monday with potentially monumental implications: a global outbreak knocking down the U.S. economy and walloping markets in an election year, all against accusations about whether the Trump administration had mismanaged and underfunded a critical response with American lives on the line.AdvertisementA swift drop in the stock market — the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than 1,000 points, its largest slide in two years — jolted officials in the White House and across Washington, delivering implications from the long-simmering coronavirus threat to a wider swath of Americans.“The view in the White House is that this is one of those classic black swan events, and all we can do is control the health issues in the U.S.,” said Stephen Moore, an informal economic adviser to the Trump team. Aides fear the White House has few economic tricks it can deploy to lessen the impact.Meanwhile, officials like acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and domestic policy chief Joe Grogan have turned their fire on HHS Secretary Alex Azar, who’s leading the coronavirus response, arguing that Azar has poorly coordinated the strategy, failed to escalate the potential risks to Trump and pushed for a multibillion-dollar emergency-funding request that they initially viewed as extreme, said four individuals familiar with the matter.The Trump administration on Monday night announced a request for $2.5 billion in emergency coronavirus cash, which would also shift at least $535 million in previously committed funds. The U.S. surveillance effort has been hampered by the failure of the health department’s tests, with public health labs on Monday asking for permission to use their own homegrown tests rather than wait on the CDC.“If we have an outbreak in the United States and didn’t pick it up, that’s going to be a public health mistake of historic proportion,” said a former senior HHS official.Some White House officials also remain frustrated by the Chinese government’s handling of the outbreak, but Trump has been hesitant to publicly criticize President Xi Jinping.