By Seung Min Kim, Washington Post–

The president and the speaker haven’t spoken in months, while the president is openly taunting the Senate’s top Democrat about a potential primary challenge more than two years away. The top Republicans have direct channels to the president but don’t share the same big-spending appetite as the leader of their party.

The core five leaders in Washington — President Trump, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) — and their interactions with one another have come under scrutiny amid the coronavirus outbreak, as the pandemic continues to swamp the nation, killing thousands of Americans and plunging the U.S. economy into crisis.

Yet for all the public signs of discord, communications and coordination between congressional leaders and the Trump administration have hummed along, compensating for the dysfunctional relationship — or the outright lack of one — between Trump himself and the top two Democrats on Capitol Hill.

Since the massive $2 trillion rescue package was signed into law March 27, Schumer has spoken on the phone with Trump about a half-dozen times, but also directly with Vice President Pence and with newly minted White House chief of staff Mark Meadows several times, according to an official familiar with the calls, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss them. And already this week, the official said, Pelosi has spoken to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin multiple times to discuss the rocky implementation of the stimulus bill and what Washington will need to do in the next phase of coronavirus legislation.

“I think that we all have a common purpose here and that’s getting through the virus and restoring the American economy,” House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard E. Neal (D-Mass.) said Tuesday.

Neal added, “I think that what I have found fascinating about this in the last few weeks is that nobody comes to the conversation saying, ‘I’m a libertarian.’ Nobody comes to the conversation saying, ‘I’m a socialist.’ They come to the conversation saying, ‘We got to get this done. This is desperate.’ ”

Neal participated in a nearly hour-long call with Pelosi, Mnuchin, Rep. Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.) and Rep. Nydia M. Velázquez (D-N.Y.) on Monday afternoon. During it, the Democrats and Mnuchin discussed efforts to implement the massive rescue bill, including issues with a new $349 billion fund that offers taxpayer-backed loans for small businesses, as well as legislative fixes to the package and future economic mitigation efforts, according to officials familiar with the call, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely.

Mnuchin, Neal said, was “very mindful” of the Democrats’ perspective.

The communications between the administration and Congress will continue to increase this week, when Pence — who heads the White House coronavirus task force — will lead four separate conference calls with House Democrats, House Republicans, Senate Democrats and Senate Republicans.

Others participating on the calls, which a Pence spokeswoman said was meant to offer an update on the administration’s coronavirus efforts and to field questions from lawmakers, will include Deborah Birx, the task force’s coordinator; Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-diseases official; and Rear Adm. John Polowczyk, who is overseeing the supply chain efforts.

Congressional officials have largely likened the recent public rancor between Trump and the top Democratic leaders to the dynamic that played out in the final days of negotiations of the economic rescue package last month, when senators delivered theatrical and sharply partisan speeches in the chamber while senior negotiators continued to hammer out the massive bill in private.

Schumer, whose flip phone is a ubiquitous presence next to his ear as he traipses the Capitol, has been similarly chatty with administration officials after lawmakers left Washington until at least April 20.

In addition to the calls with Trump, Pence and Meadows, the Senate minority leader has arranged conversations with Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia and Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to ensure the additional funding for unemployment insurance programs is quickly disbursed. He has also spoken with Mnuchin and other Democratic senators to ensure that airline workers won’t be laid off as they receive federal aid, according to an official with knowledge of the conversations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to freely discuss the deliberations.

The minority leader has repeatedly pressed Trump to appoint a military czar to oversee all distribution efforts of critical supplies during the pandemic. That request, along with Schumer’s demand for Trump to fully invoke the powers of a Korean War-era law to compel production of needed materials, prompted an unusually caustic letter from Trump to Schumer late last week.

In it, Trump accused Schumer of insufficiently preparing the president’s former home state for the coronavirus crisis and added: “I’ve known you for many years, but I never knew how bad a senator you are for the state of New York, until I became president.”

Schumer has declined to engage, telling CNN that the president’s comments “don’t faze me.”

Both Pelosi and Trump have dismissed the significance of their lack of direct discussions with one another. Their last substantive conversation was in mid-October during a White House meeting on the spiraling crisis in Syria, when a photo released by the administration captured a standing Pelosi with her pointer finger outstretched toward Trump, seated on the other side of the table in the Cabinet Room.

Last week, Pelosi said discussions between a speaker and a president are “usually done on an as-needed basis.”

“If it were important for the American people, I’d talk to her,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Friday. “But other than that, I can have other people talking to her.”

Nonetheless, that evaporated relationship is a stark contrast to the last time that Pelosi held the speaker’s gavel with a Republican in the White House amid a crisis that put the nation’s economy in peril.

John Lawrence, the former longtime chief of staff to Pelosi, recalled the frequent communications between Pelosi, her staff and aides at the White House during the George W. Bush administration — relations that were pivotal during the 2008 financial meltdown.

Before the crisis, Lawrence said, congressional leaders would jointly meet with Bush at the White House roughly every month, and he would meet nearly every week with senior White House staff. The absence of direct communication between Pelosi and Trump now, Lawrence said, is “problematic.”

“That stuff doesn’t bother her, I don’t think, but it really deprives the Congress and the country of that level of collaborative interaction that is really important,” Lawrence said. “When you get into crisis, you need two things: You need trust, and the ability to move swiftly. And it’s really hard to move swiftly when you don’t have that level of trust.”

Meanwhile, McConnell and McCarthy, the two senior Republicans in Congress, have maintained close communication with the White House, with McCarthy making an appearance there last week alongside Trump before the president spoke with reporters on the latest coronavirus efforts.

As he introduced him on Friday, Trump warmly called McCarthy, with whom he had just met, the “future speaker of the House.”

“I would like to thank you,” McCarthy responded to Trump. “On the basis of California, Gov. [Gavin] Newsom says the work that you’re doing together has been — you’re working very closely — has been effective in California as well.”

Along with the administration, McConnell and McCarthy coordinated a plan announced Tuesday to try to inject more money as soon as this week into the new small business coronavirus program that is already overwhelmed with demand. Democrats didn’t reject the plan outright, although a spokesman for Schumer said Republicans had not discussed the effort with key Democratic senators.

Yet Trump, rarely mindful about federal spending, has also repeatedly called for new infrastructure projects to revive the economy — a request that hasn’t been shared publicly by top congressional Republicans just yet.

seungmin.kim@washpost.com