L
NATION
arry Hogan Has got anotHer of His
ideas, and this one cracks him up. “I’m
gonna call Pence!” says Hogan, startling
his chief of staff, Matt Clark, who sits
across a large, round faux-wood table.
Hogan, the Republican governor of Mary-
land, is meeting with his coronavirus
command team, a skeleton crew of state
officials still reporting to the capitol in Annapolis.
The conference rooms are all too narrow, so they are
gathered in a cavernous event room, seated in alter-
nate chairs to maintain social distancing. Hogan, a
ruddy 63-year-old with jug-handle ears, has in front
of him a dispenser of hand sanitizer, a can of Diet
Coke and a starfish- shaped conference- call speaker.
The President, Hogan reminds the group, recently
chided him for going around Vice President Mike
Pence’s coronavirus task force to procure supplies.
“Remember, Trump said, ‘He’s wasting his time. He
should’ve just called Mike!’ ” He laughs a wheezy
laugh. “So I’m gonna joke with him and say, ‘Hey,
Mike, where’s my tests? The President said I should
just call you!’ But then seriously say, ‘You both said
we can use federal labs. When can we start?’ ”
“Right. Got it,” Clark says.
“I got a feeling they’re gonna backpedal on all
that,” Hogan says.
Like every other governor in America, Hogan is
dealing with a crisis for which there is no playbook.
The team assembled here began its April 22 brief-
ing on a somber note, as the state’s health secretary,
Bobby Neall, read off the numbers: 14,775 total con-
firmed cases of COVID-19, up 582 from the day be-
fore; 631 deaths in the past five weeks, up 47 from
the previous day’s count. Hogan was briefed about
a possible outbreak at a chicken plant on the Del-
aware border and about a convention center being
converted into a field hospital; he got word that his
latest shipment of testing supplies from South Korea
had arrived, greeted at Baltimore- Washington Inter-
national Airport by his Korean-American wife Yumi
with platters of crab cakes and kimchi.
Hogan has worked around the clock since declar-
ing a state of emergency 48 days earlier, issuing 38
executive orders and calling up the state’s National
Guard. The closest thing he can imagine is a natu-
ral disaster, he says, but even that doesn’t capture
it. “This is like a hurricane that hits all 50 states
every single day,” he tells me later, crammed into a
navy blue armchair in his spacious office decorated
with memorabilia. “And it continues in intensity. It
doesn’t go away. It just keeps hitting, hitting, hitting.”
From Tallahassee to Olympia, in big states and
small, every governor in America has improvised
something like this, scrambling to keep up with the
outbreak. The governors are constantly comparing
notes—in the past 24 hours, Hogan tells me, he’s
texted with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, Il-
linois Governor J.B. Pritzker and Arizona Governor
Doug Ducey. As chairman of the National Governors
Association (NGA), Hogan has tried to coordinate
their efforts, convening a series of calls in which they
trade ideas and information.
The cooperation has been crucial. Governors will
tell you they’re always the officials whose leadership
most directly affects people’s lives. But that’s been
truer than ever in the current crisis, as Trump has
been more occupied with defending his performance
and casting blame than with mounting the kind of
coordinated national effort that other countries’
leaders have orchestrated. While the White House
COVID-19
