A Tale of Two Washingtons
The FRONTLINE Dispatch
GBH
4.5 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 17 April 2020
⏱️ 25 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What the feud between President Trump and Washington Gov. Inslee reveals about federal-state tensions in the coronavirus fight. In his conversation with Gov. Inslee, FRONTLINE correspondent Miles O’Brien discovers that “what should be a partnership with the federal government is like this hostile relationship.”Â
Inslee describes a scenario in which states are left competing with each other for scarce resources: “We are searching the world for every potential warehouse that has any of this personal protective equipment… and states are bidding against one another,” he tells O’Brien. “It would be much more efficient, economically and otherwise, if the federal government was playing a more vigorous role.”
Listen to the podcast now, and stay tuned for O’Brien’s documentary Coronavirus Pandemic, premiering April 21, which explores the differing responses to the coronavirus outbreak in Washington D.C. and Washington State — where the first known U.S. case of COVID-19 was detected.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | The Frontline Dispatch is made possible by the Abrams Foundation, |
| 0:03.6 | committed to excellence in journalism, |
| 0:05.6 | and by the Frontline Journalism Fund, with major support from John and Joanne Hagler. |
| 0:10.8 | Support for Frontline Dispatch comes from the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Service. and When you hear the word cancer their team is ready learn more at mass general |
| 0:24.6 | dot org slash cancer. So let's go to early March now and this is right about in the |
| 0:30.1 | time you declared a state of emergency and it was also right around the time |
| 0:34.8 | that the president called you a snake. At that point did you get the sense that you as a governor and the state of |
| 0:46.4 | Washington were sort of on their own and the federal cavalry was not coming? |
| 0:50.0 | Yes, but we didn't ever depend on that leadership coming out of the White House, so it's not something |
| 0:57.3 | that we were surprised by. |
| 0:59.4 | We always knew that we would have to lead the charge, given the President's reluctance to that's |
| 1:05.0 | to really exercise leadership on this. |
| 1:09.0 | That's Washington Governor Jay Inslee, speaking with |
| 1:12.0 | reporter and frontline correspondent Miles O'Brien. |
| 1:15.8 | It was not a shock. |
| 1:17.0 | It was extremely disappointing and disheartening. |
| 1:19.2 | Downplaying what was an emerging problem that could only be explained by someone who had their eye on the Dow Jones rather than an eye on the epidemiological curve. |
| 1:29.0 | Myles has been reporting from Seattle where the first known case of COVID-19 was identified in the US, |
| 1:35.8 | and he's been following the ongoing tensions between the governor and the president over |
| 1:40.0 | the response to the outbreak. So you know, you kind of go down the list to the outbreak. |
| 1:42.6 | So you know you kind of go down the list and almost everything |
| 1:45.2 | that Inslee sees as important. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from GBH, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of GBH and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.