The Divider, page 59
Azar tried to calm him down. “Listen, Mr. President, she shouldn’t have gotten out there yet,” he said, “but what she said is true and we were planning to meet with you when you got back to walk you through this.”
It did not help that Messonnier was the sister of Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who had appointed Robert Mueller. Conservative media figures like Rush Limbaugh quickly linked the matters, suggesting that she was trying to undermine the president just like conservatives believed her brother had. This made perfect sense to the conspiracy-theory-driven Trump.
Whatever his suspicions, Trump came to understand after landing back in Washington that he needed at least to appear to be more on top of the growing crisis. But Azar was not the one he wanted as the administration’s public face handling the outbreak. Behind the scenes, the health secretary had alienated fellow administration officials by not including in task force meetings officials such as Stephen Hahn, the Food and Drug Administration commissioner, or Seema Verma, who ran Medicaid and Medicare for the government. Azar was also criticized for marginalizing the CDC, resisting bringing in agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency that would tread on his turf, and brushing off entreaties to mobilize the private sector to step up production of medical equipment.
So the evening after Trump’s return from India, the president marched into the White House briefing room to announce that Mike Pence would head the White House coronavirus task force. “We’re very, very ready for this,” Trump insisted.[27]
No one bothered to tell Azar he was about to be supplanted until just a few hours before it was announced. As for Pence’s team, they could not help wondering if the vice president was put in charge just to have someone to blame when everything went bad. “This is a no win,” realized Marc Short, the vice president’s chief of staff.
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Pence’s elevation put him in the public spotlight in a sustained way for the first time since he took office as the nation’s forty-eighth vice president. For the preceding three years, he had been the invisible man with the frozen smile, noticed only when he stood silently behind the president, “mustering a devotional gaze rarely seen since the days of Nancy Reagan,” as Jane Mayer wrote in The New Yorker.[28] Republicans on Capitol Hill nicknamed him “the Bobblehead” for his ritual nodding whenever Trump spoke.[29] Pence was no more revealing in private. Senior administration officials could not recall him saying anything of consequence on virtually any subject at virtually any meeting.
One Republican governor fed up with Trump recalled how determined Pence was never to betray even a hint of criticism of the president. “I say, ‘But Mike, this is just crazy,’ and sometimes there will be a little pause and I’m waiting for him to say, ‘Yes, I know,’ ” the governor recalled. But “he never, ever takes the bait,” the governor added. “He says, ‘I understand, thank you for the input.’ He won’t say, ‘I agree.’ ” To another person who worked with him, the most Pence would say of Trump was, “He’s like an untamed lion who came into the city.” When this person expressed pointed criticism, the vice president would simply reply, “Well, we’re praying for him.” It was a ferocious discipline beyond that of any other person who served Trump, and a remarkable exercise in self-preservation.
In taking on the role of Trump’s understudy, Pence had resolved to emulate George H. W. Bush, who demonstrated unwavering loyalty as Ronald Reagan’s vice president despite differences over policy. Pence concluded that the best way to influence decisions was to spend as much time as possible around the president, whether invited or not. Everyone understood that Trump often sided with the last person he heard from. So Pence would drop by the Oval Office in the morning and, if Trump was not there yet, stride over to the residence to wait at the elevator for him to come down. He was in the Oval Office so often that Trump’s executive assistant, Madeleine Westerhout, finally devised a way to pry him out. She would slip him a note from a vice presidential aide that said: “Mr. Vice President, the second lady is wondering when you’re going to be home for dinner.” Trump would then join in. “Mike, go, have a good night,” he would say.[30]
One adviser compared Pence to a stonecutter—it was not the one-hundredth hit that broke the rock but the ninety-nine that came before. Pence would persistently nudge the president over time toward where he wanted him to go, particularly on issues such as abortion, where the vice president’s staff declared victory by getting a president who had once called himself “very pro-choice” to address the annual March for Life demonstration. This, at least, was their theory.
But to others in Trump’s orbit, Pence was not much of a presence even when he was in the room. To say Pence was vanilla was to underestimate the blandness he projected. “Mike Pence is vanilla ice cream,” explained a prominent adviser to Trump, “but he’s not Breyers vanilla ice cream or Häagen-Dazs. He’s like Stop & Shop vanilla ice cream”—generic, boring, predictable, and not necessarily worth opening the freezer to get.
For Trump, though, loyalty was something to be received, not given. As 2020 approached, the president regularly asked aides, advisers, even visitors to the White House what they thought of Pence and broached the idea of dumping him from the re-election ticket in favor of Nikki Haley, his former U.N. ambassador. Trump raised the possibility during a long Christmas night flight to Iraq in 2018, asking John Bolton whether he thought it was a good idea. He brought it up in an Oval Office meeting, where Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, and his campaign manager Brad Parscale all made the case for why such a switch would make sense. He even asked Westerhout, his twentysomething executive assistant, whether he should dump his vice president. Trump was breathtakingly indiscreet and naturally word leaked out. In the end, though, Trump decided not to do it—replacing Pence with Haley probably would not gain Trump significant votes and could alienate evangelicals. But the point was made. The vice president, like all those around Trump, served purely at the pleasure of the president.
Through it all, Pence kept his stone face. Even with personal friends, the mask stayed on. “Mike never let his guard down for a second with me or with anybody I know,” recalled Jeff Flake, the former senator who had once been one of Pence’s closest friends in Congress before he publicly broke with the president.
Flake was not the only one baffled by Pence’s transformation. At a ceremony once, Pence ran into an evangelical pastor he had met before. The pastor took the opportunity to implore Pence to look past the politics of his current job.
“You know, Mr. Vice President, more than anything, we need you to find your conscience,” the pastor said. “The country desperately needs you to find your conscience.”
“It’s always easier said than done,” Pence replied cryptically and then walked away.[31]
Pence’s turn in charge of the greatest crisis yet of the Trump presidency began, perhaps not surprisingly, with an appeal to God. Shortly after the announcement, Pence gathered the coronavirus team in his office to get up to speed. Alex Azar, in the awkward position of just having been replaced, showed up in Pence’s suite to brief the vice president and his advisers.
“Alex,” Pence said to Azar, “why don’t you kick us off with a prayer?”
Azar was deeply religious but not a pray-in-the-office kind of guy and felt uncomfortable. What he may not have known is that every staff meeting in Pence’s office started off with a prayer, a highly unusual practice in the federal government. Even at the State Department run by Mike Pompeo, an evangelical Christian who kept an open Bible on his desk, aides said they had never seen him mix official business and prayer. But in the vice president’s office, it was a daily practice, and Olivia Troye, the Pence aide who advised him on homeland security and was now staffing the coronavirus task force, used to tell newcomers who came to brief him, “I would recommend bowing your head or you’re going to announce to the world that you’re the Deep State.”
Azar dutifully offered a prayer only to become even more uncomfortable as the Covid meeting progressed. When he outlined what the task force had been doing, he was interrupted by Marc Short, a skilled bureaucratic infighter as Pence’s chief of staff.
“The problem here is communications discipline,” Short said. “This thing is off the rails because you’ve got too many people out talking and saying different things. We’ve got to get control on communications. That’s the most important thing to do.”
Azar and some of the others thought the most important priorities would be to expand testing, limit large-scale gatherings, and stock up on medical equipment like masks and ventilators, among other things—all actions they should have been taking already.
After the meeting, Azar went up to Mulvaney’s office. “This is starting to feel like a hostile takeover,” Azar said.
“If Marc Short’s involved,” Mulvaney replied, “it’s a hostile takeover.”
Indeed, by the time Azar got back to his office, he was told that all his scheduled media appearances had been canceled, as had Tony Fauci’s, albeit temporarily. No one was to go on television or give an interview without permission from the vice president’s office. Pence’s people quickly made clear they wanted a different tone too, playing down the threat from the virus. The day after Pence was put in charge, Health and Human Services officials submitted their planned communication message to his office. “While the situation could change rapidly, at this time, Americans don’t need to change their day-to-day lives, but should stay informed and practice good hygiene,” the understated message said. Still, Pence’s communications director, Katie Miller, objected. “Even for HHS this is a bit alarmist,” she wrote department officials in an email on February 27. “Couldn’t we just start with Americans don’t need to change their day-to-day lives and leave out the rapid change?”[32]
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Where Pence’s staff saw a communications problem, Trump saw a political threat. The virus was not a looming public health disaster but an extension of the post-impeachment partisan war he was fighting with Democrats and the Deep State. “The Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus,” he told a rally of supporters two days after putting the vice president in charge of the task force. “This is their new hoax.” After all, he said, “so far we have lost nobody to the coronavirus in the United States. Nobody.” But “the press is in hysteria mode.”[33]
Mick Mulvaney expressed Trump’s view even more explicitly at a forum that same day. Democrats, he told a conservative audience, “think this will bring down the president; that’s what this is all about.”[34]
But Trump, still focused on punishment, had one more scalp to take—Mulvaney’s. The acting chief of staff had sealed his fate in the fall when he acknowledged the quid pro quo in the Ukraine scheme. Trump seethed about the admission but held off acting so long as the impeachment proceedings were continuing lest he give ammunition to the Democrats and incentivize Mulvaney to come forward and testify.
With the trial over, Trump was ready to get rid of Mulvaney. His choice for his fourth chief of staff was Mark Meadows, the North Carolina congressman and Trump’s vocal defender during the House impeachment. In December, Meadows had announced that he would leave the House to work more “closely” with Trump, a move that seemed all but certain to result in him displacing Mulvaney. Now Jared Kushner called to see if Meadows would make it official and replace Mulvaney as chief of staff. Meadows said yes. Assured of a positive response, Trump later pulled Meadows aside following a meeting on foreign surveillance legislation to discuss timing. “Soon,” Trump said. “It’s going to have to be soon.”[35]
The next day, the first American was officially confirmed to have died of Covid on American soil.
CHAPTER 22
Game Changer
The lights were low, the dance floor was crowded, and the disco balls were spinning when the cake with white icing, a ring of strawberries, and a fiery sparkler shooting flames into the air was brought out to a robust rendition of “Happy Birthday.” Kimberly Guilfoyle, wearing a thigh-hugging gold leaf dress that disappeared well above the knees, beamed with delight. The president stood beside the birthday girl and clapped.
“Four more years!” Guilfoyle shouted, pumping her arm in the air.
Trump responded with his own toast for Guilfoyle, the former Fox News host now dating his oldest son.
“This is a special deal with Kimberly,” he said. “So Kimberly,” he teased, “how old are you?” He then let her off the hook. “No, I’m not going to ask you that.”
“Twenty-nine!” someone in the crowd called out.
Guilfoyle liked that. “Twenty-nine!” she agreed.
“She looks young to me,” Trump offered.[1]
In fact, it was her fifty-first birthday, as Trump probably knew since his own wife, Melania, was just about to turn fifty. It was a lavish, festive, even carefree Saturday evening at Mar-a-Lago, with scores of guests on hand to celebrate at Guilfoyle’s $50,000 bash, which would end with her, shoeless, dancing in a conga line dubbed the “Trump train” as Gloria Estefan blared. In addition to the family, the partygoers constituted a who’s who of Trumpworld: There was Mike Pence, as stoic and stiff as ever, and Rudy Giuliani with a drink in hand, and Bernie Kerik, his recently pardoned buddy, the convicted former New York police commissioner. In a sports coat with no tie was Lindsey Graham, who took the microphone at one point to praise Guilfoyle. “You represent everything Bernie Sanders hates,” he said, and promised to get her a tax cut. Nearby were political donors, some of whom had been hit up to foot the bill. Matt Gaetz, the brash young Republican congressman from Florida, looked right at home at a booze-soaked dance party. Less comfortable perhaps were Robert O’Brien, the national security adviser, and Ric Grenell, the new acting director of national intelligence.
And then there was Jair Bolsonaro, the president of Brazil, because, well, it was Mar-a-Lago and you never knew who would show up.
The first family’s awkward dynamics were on full display. First, Ivanka and Jared, dressed for the official business dinner with Bolsonaro they had been included in while the other family members had not, offered toasts to Guilfoyle, who sat next to Don Jr., bathed in the purple and pink lighting that suffused the ballroom for her party. “It’s been amazing to get to know you,” Kushner told her. “You work so, so hard for the president,” Ivanka added.
When it was his turn, Eric Trump pushed sibling boundaries as he wrapped his arm around Guilfoyle. “You’re so freaking beautiful I might take you home tonight,” he said. “Would Don be upset?” Turning to his wife, Lara, Eric asked, “Honey, would you be upset?”
The president, meanwhile, happily introduced the visiting South American leader—a self-styled populist like himself, often called the Trump of the Tropics—to guests including Tucker Carlson, boasting that he “gave him a good gift” by not imposing tariffs on Brazil and “that made him much more popular.” Bolsonaro laughed and agreed.
But it was to be the last tango at Mar-a-Lago, at least for a while. As Trump escorted Bolsonaro into his Palm Beach club that night, a reporter told him that the first coronavirus case had been reported in the Washington area and asked if it worried him that it was getting closer to the White House. “No,” Trump said, “I’m not concerned at all.”[2]
In fact, it was even closer than that. Several members of Bolsonaro’s delegation who mingled with Trump that evening had already been infected. As it turned out, Guilfoyle’s birthday bash would incubate a Covid hot zone, offering dramatic proof that no one was safe, not even the president of the United States.
On his way down to Florida the day before the party, Trump had stopped in Atlanta to visit the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention with a clutch of journalists to demonstrate that he had the situation under control. Wearing a red “Keep America Great” baseball cap, he acted as if it were just another campaign event, trashing the Democratic governor of Washington as a “snake,” bragging about his “natural ability” to understand science, and claiming that “anybody that wants a test can get a test,” which was not even close to true, although none of the officials standing next to him dared correct him.
Trump also said out loud what he had made abundantly clear in private, that his main concern was not the health of Americans at risk but what their illnesses would mean for him politically. Asked whether he would allow people to disembark from a cruise ship idling off the coast of San Francisco where nineteen crew members and two passengers had tested positive for the virus, Trump said he would rather not, since their cases would be added to the total number of infections in the United States. And that would make him look bad. “I like the numbers being where they are,” he said. “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.”[3]
It was hardly the performance of a leader who had the crisis firmly in hand. Neither was Trump’s decision, after arriving in Florida later that evening, to take a few minutes out from dinner to fire Mick Mulvaney via tweet, adding yet another White House management shuffle to the concerns of a nation increasingly fearful about what the coronavirus would bring to the United States. “I want to thank Acting Chief Mick Mulvaney,” the president wrote at 8:08 p.m., a reminder that, for all fourteen contentious months of his tenure, Trump had never even respected him enough to bestow the full title without the asterisk.
The pretext Trump now seized on was Mulvaney’s decision to go ahead with an annual getaway with his brother for the NCAA college basketball tournament in Las Vegas. “How could you leave at a time like this?” Trump had yelled at him over the phone the day before his flight to Mar-a-Lago.[4] It was all a show, though: Mulvaney had previously told him about the trip and Trump had offered the job to Mark Meadows a week earlier.
