The Divider, page 57
One thing Trump could not fake was love for his enemies, even at a prayer breakfast. For the president, this was a moment for retaliation, not reconciliation. As he followed Brooks to the podium that morning, he chided the scholar for suggesting otherwise. “Arthur, I don’t know if I agree with you,” he said. Instead, Trump gloated to the audience about his victory, holding up newspapers with banner headlines that said, “Acquitted” and “Trump Acquitted,” and then laid out his grievances. “As everybody knows, my family, our great country and your president have been put through a terrible ordeal by some very dishonest and corrupt people,” he said. Then he read the lines he had added in the car ride over. First, he lashed out at Mitt Romney, who had cited his religious beliefs in voting to convict. “I don’t like people who use their faith as justification for doing what they know is wrong,” Trump said. He did not mention Romney by name. He did not need to. Then, in a clear reference to Pelosi, a practicing Catholic who had said that she prayed for the president, he added, “Nor do I like people who say, ‘I pray for you,’ when they know that’s not so.”[3]
A few hours later, Trump staged a victory rally in the White House, where he gathered allies, aides, and even the attorney general to hear him unleash a vituperative barrage against his enemies. He assailed “crooked” lawmakers and the “top scum” at the FBI for trying to take him down. No longer avoiding naming his targets, he denounced Pelosi as “a horrible person,” Romney as “a failed presidential candidate,” James Comey as “that sleazebag,” the former FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page as “two lowlifes,” and Adam Schiff as a “corrupt politician.”
“It was evil,” Trump said of the investigations that led to his Senate trial. “It was corrupt. It was dirty cops. It was leakers and liars, and this should never ever happen to another president, ever. I don’t know that other presidents would have been able to take it.” Referring to the allegations against him, he said, “It was all bullshit,” surely the first time any president had used such profanity on live television from the East Room of the White House.[4] The audience laughed.
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Susan Collins, the Maine Republican, had justified her vote to acquit Trump that week by saying she was sure he had learned “a pretty big lesson.” She even ventured to predict that “he will be much more cautious in the future.”[5] But whatever lesson Collins imagined him taking from impeachment was not the one he began applying.
In the aftermath of his acquittal, Trump felt emboldened, free to use his power as he saw fit to punish enemies and benefit friends. His approval rating had climbed to the highest level of his presidency and now stood at 49 percent in the Gallup poll, which, even though it meant he still had not earned the support of a majority of Americans, was enough to convince him that the public stood with him.[6] With the trial over, he no longer had to worry about alienating squishy Republican senators. He felt no fear of accountability. What were they going to do? Impeach him again?
For those who watched the president in his daily monologues in the Oval Office or Situation Room, the change was hard to miss. “When it really started getting unmanageable was right after he beat the charges of impeachment,” Mark Esper, the defense secretary, later observed. The president, he told an associate, was “unleashed.”
The morning of the prayer breakfast, Stephanie Grisham, the White House press secretary, declared on Fox News that those who hurt the president “should pay for” it and within forty-eight hours of the Senate vote they did.[7] Alexander Vindman, who had already cleared out his desk knowing what was coming, was marched out of the White House for good, as was Eugene Vindman, his twin brother on the National Security Council staff, for the crime of being related to someone who testified against the president. Gordon Sondland was told to resign immediately as ambassador to the European Union but refused, saying he would rather be fired, which he immediately was.
In the weeks to come, others would be targeted, even those who had tangential roles in impeachment. Joseph Maguire, the acting director of national intelligence who brokered the deal to hand over the Ukraine whistleblower’s complaint to Congress, was forced out and replaced by Richard Grenell, the combative ambassador to Germany and a Trump favorite (“my beautiful Ric,” the president called him). Maguire’s successor as head of the National Counterterrorism Center was also forced out and replaced with a National Security Council official, Christopher Miller. At the Pentagon, John Rood, the undersecretary of defense who had certified that Ukraine met the conditions for the aid that Trump nonetheless froze, was pushed aside, while Elaine McCusker, a Defense Department official who questioned the aid suspension, had her nomination to be Pentagon comptroller withdrawn. So did Jessie Liu, the United States attorney who had prosecuted Roger Stone and had been nominated to be undersecretary of the treasury.
Others left on their own rather than wait to be fired or humiliated. Marie Yovanovitch retired from the Foreign Service, ending her thirty-three-year career. Bill Taylor, who had reluctantly agreed to return to Ukraine as acting ambassador after Yovanovitch was fired, found himself shunned by Mike Pompeo, who did not want to show up on an official trip to Kyiv while one of Trump’s impeachment accusers was still leading the American embassy there, so Taylor left Ukraine early and returned to his think tank post. Jennifer Williams, a Mike Pence aide who had listened to the “perfect” phone call and testified under subpoena, worried that she would be next, and her colleague Olivia Troye, another vice presidential adviser, urged her to leave the White House before Trump’s enforcers targeted her. “They could destroy your next assignment,” she told Williams. “You need to get out of here.” Williams quietly moved to the Defense Department.
Trump also went after a series of inspectors general who had angered him, firing or replacing five of them in quick succession, including most prominently Michael Atkinson, who had insisted on telling Congress about the CIA whistleblower complaint. Inspectors general were appointed by the president subject to confirmation by the Senate but intended by Congress to serve as independent checks on executive departments. Trump could hardly care less what Congress intended.
To conduct a broader purge, Trump enlisted Johnny McEntee, his onetime personal assistant, newly returned from exile to take over as director of presidential personnel. McEntee, a twenty-nine-year-old former University of Connecticut football quarterback whose main claim to fame was filming a video of trick passes that drew seven million viewers, had talked his way into Trump’s 2016 campaign after a fusillade of unsolicited emails, then went along with him to the White House. In the spring of 2018, he had been fired by John Kelly over undisclosed gambling winnings (“I really know how to play blackjack well,” he had tried to explain to the chief of staff) and was escorted out of the compound without even being allowed to grab his coat, a move that upset his friends around the building, including the president, who gave him a job at the campaign as a consolation prize. With Kelly long gone, McEntee was back as an unlikely power broker in the White House and opened a sweeping attack not just on career officials who had played roles, however minor, in the impeachment, but on the president’s own political appointees.
McEntee began grilling officials to determine who would be pushed out. He asked one senior government official where he got his news. When the official replied Fox, he was deemed acceptable. McEntee asked another official his opinion of Trump’s desire to pull troops out of Afghanistan. “I work at the EPA,” the confused official responded.[8] He went after an acting assistant defense secretary because she had worked for the Senate Armed Services Committee under John McCain; she was forced to resign even though by that point she had worked for Trump longer than she had for McCain.
Whether motivated by resentment over how he himself had been treated or a sense that Trump was being undermined by internal enemies, McEntee the loyalty enforcer was harder-edged than the eager young body man had been. Some of his colleagues were stunned at his new persona, including Stephanie Grisham, who had lobbied to bring him back. “The John McEntee I knew in the campaign and the beginning was just this great guy who believed in the boss and wanted to do a good job,” she said later. “The John McEntee who came back was vindictive, cocky, angry, manipulative.”
Trump made no pretense that his purge was anything other than what it was. Loyalty was now the defining job qualification for service in his administration. The Republican senators who had objected during the trial to the suggestion that Trump would put heads on pikes in retribution for impeachment largely remained silent as the skulls piled up.
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That February was in many ways the month that changed his presidency. As the president reveled in his victory over Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff, he did not recognize the gathering threat from the coronavirus, to the country and to his own future in that fall’s election. Looking ahead to the campaign, Trump thought he had it won. Campaign advisers were telling Trump that, regardless of public polls that showed him losing to pretty much any Democrat, he could not only win a second term but win convincingly, even potentially in a landslide. “Internal REAL polls show I am beating all of the Dem candidates,” Trump bragged on Twitter after his campaign team showed him a presentation that, implausibly, had him winning as many as four hundred electoral votes and taking even reliably Democratic states such as Colorado and New Mexico.
Even so, some of his lieutenants tried to warn him that the emerging public health crisis could be serious enough to destroy his administration. “The one thing that makes you lose,” Brad Parscale, his campaign manager, told Trump on February 12, was this new virus. Trump could not accept that. How could he? He was riding high. He was invincible.
While his focus was elsewhere, his administration was not only unprepared for the scale of the disaster about to overwhelm it but deeply divided over how to handle it. From the start, Trump’s advisers alternated between urgently seeking his attention on the coronavirus and arguing among themselves over what to do once they secured it.
The government had gotten its first warning on New Year’s Eve, just before the start of the Senate trial, when Robert Redfield, the Trump-appointed director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, read a notice reporting twenty-seven cases of an unknown virus found in Wuhan, a major Chinese industrial city of more than 11 million. Matt Pottinger, the Asia expert who had been promoted to deputy national security adviser, convened the first interagency meeting about the situation on January 14. But the outbreak came at a delicate time in Trump’s trade negotiations with China. The day after Pottinger’s meeting, the president announced a preliminary deal to ease the trade war he had been waging for two years as Beijing agreed to open its markets to more American companies and committed to buying an additional $200 billion in American exports by the following year. The last thing Trump wanted to do was disrupt the election-year truce.
That Saturday, while Trump was tweeting about “Crazy Bernie” Sanders and “this Impeachment Scam,” Alex Azar, the secretary of health and human services, tried to warn the president about the virus. He called Mick Mulvaney, who was with the president at Mar-a-Lago, and asked to speak with Trump. When the president came on the phone, Trump barely let Azar get a word in before chewing him out for screwing up their policy on e-cigarettes. He was hot. “You lost me the election!” Trump snapped.
But as Trump moved to end the call, Azar interrupted. “There’s this new virus out of China that could be extremely dangerous,” the health secretary said. “It could be the kind of thing we have been preparing for and worried about.”
Trump seemed disinterested. “Yeah, okay,” he said before hanging up.
A few days later China abruptly ordered a lockdown in Wuhan, essentially walling off one of its largest metropolises. It did not require secret intelligence briefings to comprehend this was no longer some isolated problem but a serious crisis. Still, Trump seemed more worried about jeopardizing his new trade deal than pressing China on the virus. Hours after the Wuhan lockdown, he told advisers he wanted to publicly praise Xi Jinping for his handling of the outbreak.
Several of his advisers were aghast. “For the love of God, don’t do that,” Azar said.
Mike Pompeo shook his head. “I’d be really, really careful, Mr. President,” he said.[9]
Azar then rushed out of the Oval Office to find Robert O’Brien in hopes that the national security adviser could talk Trump out of it, but was too late. “China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus,” Trump tweeted. “The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American people, I want to thank President Xi!”
One adviser who knew better was Pottinger, who had worked as a reporter in China for Reuters and The Wall Street Journal, covering the SARS outbreak in Asia in the early 2000s. After leaving journalism, he joined the Marines and served three tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. His time in China left him deeply suspicious of the Beijing regime. Now he was getting information from friends back in China that was not coming through official channels.
Pottinger thought the United States should close its borders to China but ran into uniform resistance from the president’s economic advisers, who feared the impact on business, as well as from the public health experts, who relied on the traditional scientific consensus that travel bans did not stop the spread of disease. On January 28, Pottinger heard from a doctor in China that about half the cases there were asymptomatic, making the virus almost impossible to isolate without aggressive testing and lockdowns.
Robert O’Brien brought Pottinger with him to the president’s intelligence briefing that day even as Trump’s lawyers were wrapping up his defense in the Senate trial. The two tried to impress on Trump the full scale of what a pandemic would look like.
“This will be the largest national security crisis of your presidency,” O’Brien warned Trump.
Jumping up from the couch, Pottinger repeated that this could be the worst global health crisis since the influenza pandemic a century earlier and he noted that China was already limiting travel.
“Holy fuck,” Trump responded.[10]
With developments growing more ominous, Mick Mulvaney took over the crisis meetings first convened by Pottinger and by late January decided to designate an official White House coronavirus task force headed by Azar. But the group became consumed quickly by the familiar story of Trump White House dysfunction as they fought over a China travel ban. Both Pottinger and Peter Navarro aggressively pushed for it, even getting in the face of an outsider to the Trump White House, Anthony Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who argued that experience showed travel limits did not work.
After one heated Situation Room meeting, Mulvaney found Navarro so shrill that he banned him from future meetings. He was also unnerved by Pottinger’s persistence. “You’ve got to get Pottinger under control,” Mulvaney told O’Brien.[11]
Undeterred, Navarro retreated to his office and drew up a memo pressing his case. “The lack of immune protection or an existing cure or vaccine would leave Americans defenseless in the case of a full-blown coronavirus outbreak on U.S. soil,” he wrote in the memo, dated January 29. “This lack of protection elevates the risk of the coronavirus evolving into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans.” He argued that an unchecked contagion would inflict $3.8 trillion to $5.7 trillion in economic costs and kill up to 543,000 people.[12]
Navarro was no medical expert. His hyperbolic personality and over-the-top hostility toward China made it easy to write off his alarm. He played rough, and he often inserted himself in White House fights far outside his official lane, which in theory was trade and manufacturing. Like Trump, he fancied himself an expert on many things or at least so smart that he could become one overnight. Some of his colleagues therefore had a hard time reconciling their view of Navarro as a rogue actor with the reality that he could still be right about the emerging threat.
As it was, the health advisers were beginning to come around on their own, including Fauci, Azar, and Redfield. The extent of asymptomatic cases meant that screening at airports would not keep the virus out. And new evidence suggested the virus was already being transmitted from human to human within the United States. The CDC did a reversal overnight and on January 30 recommended shutting down as much travel as possible. Azar groaned, knowing that he now had to go back to the White House and advocate for exactly what his team had been opposing.
The next morning, on January 31, Azar and others met with Trump in the Oval Office to present the recommendation to impose travel restrictions on China. While Trump would later falsely claim that he was the only one who wanted to shut down travel in the face of unanimous opposition among his advisers, in fact he was initially wary, cognizant of his trade pact and the economic consequences. “Do we really have to do that?” the president asked. Fauci said yes and walked him through why. Trump agreed.
But rather than announce it himself, he instructed Azar to disclose the decision. If anyone would take a hit for it, Trump wanted it to be his health secretary. Azar went to the Roosevelt Room and signed an order declaring a public health emergency, an action recorded only with a cell phone picture snapped by his chief of staff after Trump’s aides refused even to send the official White House photographer.
By then, however, it was already too late to keep the virus out. About 381,000 passengers had entered the United States from China in January, including thousands from Wuhan, and cases were already showing up around the United States. Moreover, Trump’s ban did not bar Americans from returning home, meaning that another forty thousand people would arrive on direct flights from China in the two months after the restrictions were put in place.[13]
