Coronavirus, Power & Security, Public Health As Trump battles coronavirus, no plans for Pence to assume temporary authority, say administration officials

Perry World House's John Gans is quoted in this piece from The Washington Post looking at what President Trump's illness means for national security.

President Trump remains on the job despite his hospitalization for covid-19 and there are no plans for Vice President Pence to assume even temporary authority as president, Trump administration officials said Saturday, the first full day of Trump’s inpatient treatment at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center...

Trump has lost infrastructure that could help him now, complicating the already fraught question of what would happen if he could not do the job, said John Gans, research director at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perry World House global policy center and author of a book about the history of the NSC.

“The modern national security system was largely created as a result of kind of similar situations, where you realize the humanity of the one person this entire system depends on,” Gans said, citing the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, the attempt on Reagan’s life and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

“Trump has slowly broken that system. He has stopped going to meetings, cut the staff dramatically, uses the Oval Office rather than the Situation Room and [has] deeply personalized policy” while keeping much of the traditional foreign policy apparatus out of the loop, Gans said.

Read more in The Washington Post >>