The Divider, page 60
Trump was changing chiefs yet again with an eye focused on his own re-election and he was sure that in Meadows he had finally found a fighter. But the coronavirus intruded on their plan when Meadows found out that he would have to quarantine following exposure to someone with the virus and would have to delay his official start—meaning the White House would be without a chief of staff entirely for a key stretch as it faced the biggest test of Trump’s presidency. Still, Meadows was no more alarmed about the pandemic than Mulvaney was, believing that the public health experts were exaggerating the danger.
There was one person at Mar-a-Lago that weekend who was worried about Covid. Tucker Carlson, who had a home in Florida not far away, had driven to Trump’s Palm Beach club that night specifically to try to convince the president to take it more seriously. Carlson did not think he got through. So he was left to try to communicate with the president the way so many had, through his Fox show. Two days later, Carlson warned viewers: “People you trust, people you probably voted for, have spent weeks minimizing what is clearly a very serious problem.”[5] No one had any doubt who he had in mind.
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By the time Trump left Florida, the virus was chasing him. Matt Gaetz, who had spent much of the weekend at Mar-a-Lago and boarded Air Force One just steps behind the president in Orlando after a fundraising stop en route back to Washington, got a call during the flight informing him that he had been exposed to someone with coronavirus.
Gaetz was so over-the-top in his cheerleading for the president that White House officials would call him when they needed someone to tell Trump how awesome he was. His website promoted him as “Trump’s Best Buddy” and “Trump’s Ultimate Defender.”[6] Gaetz loved nothing more than mocking Trump’s liberal enemies. If they were worried about this new virus, then it must be leftist overreaction; he had shown up on the House floor earlier that week in a comically bulky gas mask, pointedly mocking concern about the outbreak.
Now, only a few days later, he might have gotten it himself—and could infect the president. He isolated himself midflight, sitting alone in a compartment of the plane. Aboard the jet racing toward Washington, the television screens were tuned to Fox News as it showed the slow-motion progress of the cruise ship with twenty-one infected people heading to port despite Trump’s reluctance. “Virus Ship Watch,” said the chyron, while a red box in the lower-left-hand corner showed the sinking Dow Jones Industrial Average, which fell 7 percent and finished the day down more than 2,000 points.
As the plane was landing, Trump summoned Gaetz to his airborne office. Gaetz stood at the door, refusing to step inside for fear of getting Trump sick.
“Do you need to be wrapped in cellophane?” Trump asked.
“I’m willing to jump out of the plane without a parachute if necessary,” Gaetz answered.[7] He later tested negative without having to jump.
As Trump arrived back at the White House, where he would now be all but locked in for two months, it had become clear that Gaetz was the least of the president’s troubles. Infections were spreading through the United States at a rapid pace. Italy was already locked down, and the rest of Europe was soon to follow. The debate in the White House turned ugly as Trump’s officials contemplated shutting down travel with Europe the way they had with China.
The economic team led by Steven Mnuchin objected strenuously. Closing America to Europe could further disrupt supply chains, cripple American businesses, and strangle the economy. “If you shut down air travel from Europe, you will cause a Great Depression,” Mnuchin warned. Tomas Philipson, the acting chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, agreed, calling the proposal an overreaction. “This is just like the flu,” he insisted.
But then a new player stepped in: Deborah Birx, the State Department’s global AIDS chief who had just been abruptly called home from a meeting in South Africa to serve as the White House coronavirus coordinator at Matt Pottinger’s urging; she was given the ground-floor office recently vacated by Trump’s impeachment lawyers. Birx got in the treasury secretary’s face about his Great Depression claim. “Where’s your evidence?” she demanded, pointing out that she had charts and graphics demonstrating her point and he had none.
Robert O’Brien also pushed back against Mnuchin. “You are going to be the reason this pandemic never goes away,” he declared.
Ivanka Trump seemed most concerned that her father speak to the nation at a time of uncertainty. “There should be an address from the Oval,” she said. She turned to her husband for backup: “Jared, don’t you agree?” He did.[8]
Trump grudgingly acceded to a partial travel ban on Europe, while exempting Britain in what seemed like some sort of odd reward for its Brexit from the European Union, since its infection rates were as bad as anyone’s. And he agreed to give a national address from the Oval Office that very night, leaving his staff only a few hours to notify the television networks, figure out what he should say, and cobble together a speech. Kushner took the lead crafting the address in the Cabinet Room. For the first time, the president would be elevating the crisis to the stage that it demanded after weeks of deflection and delay.
But if the prime-time speech on the night of March 11 was an opportunity to reset, to claim the mantle of national leadership in a time of crisis, it fell short. Trump’s delivery was flat and his words hardly reassuring. If anything, they were militaristic and nationalistic. He declared war on the “foreign virus,” blaming first China and then the European Union for spreading it while insisting that the coronavirus carried “very, very low risk” for Americans. In the course of just ten minutes, he mischaracterized his own policies repeatedly, even though he was reading from a teleprompter. He said he was “suspending all travel from Europe to the United States,” when in fact his order impacted only foreigners, not Americans, and he said it would “apply to the tremendous amount of trade and cargo” crossing the ocean, when in fact it affected only people.[9] He had to correct the second of those misstatements later on Twitter.
Coming on the same day that the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a global pandemic, at a time when his own country was being radically upended, with travel halting, workplaces and schools closing down, and hospitals bracing for the impact, the address struck even a number of Trump’s advisers as unequal to the moment.
The truth was that the crisis generated by the pandemic far exceeded anything in Trump’s experience. Not since the Great Depression and World War II had Americans been so universally hit by a major catastrophe. While other events in recent times broadly affected the fabric of the country, such as the September 11 attacks and the 2008 financial crash, none reached into essentially every home and every workplace.
Trump had no idea how to handle it. The virus did not respond to his favorite instruments of power. It could not be cowed by Twitter posts, overpowered by campaign rally chants, or silenced by playground insults. For so long, Trump had believed he could overcome nearly any obstacle through sheer force of will, and in many cases he had been astonishingly successful. Over the course of his seven decades, Trump had managed to bluster and bully his way past bankruptcies, failed business ventures, lenders demanding repayment, fraud and discrimination lawsuits, and, once he reached the White House, a special counsel and even congressional impeachment. But he could not will away a plague. So he tried denial, another favorite Trump tactic. That did not work either.
The emerging pandemic would expose all the weaknesses of his divisive presidency—his distrust of his own staff and the rest of the government, his intense focus on loyalty and purges, his penchant for encouraging conflict between factions within his own circle, his personal isolation, his obsessive war with the media, his refusal, or inability, to take in new information, and his indecisiveness when forced to make tough decisions.
Trump had always been indifferent to most substantive policy matters and skeptical of anything that experts, scientific or otherwise, told him. He turned everything into a political question whose answer was whatever would benefit him politically. And that is how he would approach this crisis too. “From the time this thing hit,” said an adviser who spoke frequently with the president, “his only calculus was how does it affect my re-election.”
Trump was not the only one ill-equipped for a global pandemic. So, it turned out, was his administration. George W. Bush and Barack Obama had taken steps to ready the federal government for the prospect of a once-in-a-century outbreak, and a study by Johns Hopkins University just a few months earlier had rated the United States the best prepared country in the world for a pandemic. The Obama administration had put together a sixty-nine-page playbook for just such an emergency.
But the pandemic playbook was never taken off the shelf and Trump officials deemed it useless anyway. It did not help that John Bolton had disbanded the stand-alone global health security office in the National Security Council when he came to the White House in 2018, folding it into a larger nonproliferation and biodefense directorate. He had also fired the White House homeland security adviser, Tom Bossert, who supervised the office. Bossert, now in the private sector, had spent days in early March trying to reach Trump and Mike Pence to warn them of the urgent steps that had yet to be taken in the crisis but could not get through and was reduced to tweeting his frustration. After Trump’s speech, Bossert complained that its focus on travel bans was a “Poor use of time & energy.”[10]
The CDC, the premier public health agency of its kind anywhere, had bungled an important early step in pandemic prevention when the coronavirus first appeared over the winter, failing to establish a widespread testing scheme that would help track the virus and potentially contain it. The agency’s original test had been botched, with many kits faulty and producing inconclusive results, even as the CDC barred other labs from creating and deploying their own tests. As a result, tests were hard to come by for critical weeks when it might have been possible to limit the spread.
Because of the wasted time in February and early March when the Trump administration failed to amass medical supplies needed to handle the surge of cases that was coming, the country was also woefully understocked in personal protective equipment, or PPE, such as gloves, medical masks, goggles, face shields, and gowns, as well as lifesaving respirators. As the first wave of the illness hit in force in March, doctors and nurses were told to keep wearing disposable masks meant for a single use, sometimes for days or a week at a time, and those who could not find the real thing resorted to scarves or other improvised facial coverings. In some hospitals, medical personnel wrapped themselves in garbage bags. Ventilators for patients no longer able to breathe on their own were also in short supply.
Trump liked to blame Obama, saying “the cupboard was bare” when he took over, and it was true that the national stockpile was not as full as many thought it should be.[11] Masks used during the 2009 swine flu crisis, for instance, had never been replenished. But Trump did not explain why he had done nothing about it in his first three years in office. “I have a lot of things going on,” he eventually said when asked, then blamed the fact that he was investigated over Russian interference and impeached by the House.[12]
On March 12, as the White House finally acknowledged the reality of the pandemic the day after Trump’s speech, the president responded to the shortage of tests and medical equipment by assigning Jared Kushner to take charge, and Kushner quickly began to assemble a shadow Covid task force of his own outside the chain of command of Pence’s official task force, made up of Silicon Valley contacts, some friendly management consultants, and friends from the private sector, to figure out how to increase supplies.
But when his new advisers pleaded with him to get Trump to invoke the Defense Production Act, a Korean War–era law empowering the president to order private industry to produce needed material in a national emergency, Kushner refused. “The federal government is not going to lead this response,” Kushner told them. “It’s up to the states to figure out what they want to do.”[13] The next week, he and Trump repeated this in a public briefing. “We’re not a shipping clerk,” the president said.[14] Days into the crisis, the Trump administration had seemingly abandoned a federal leadership role.
Trump was also reluctant to embrace the new guidelines that the official Pence task force recommended he approve, as they would amount to an unprecedented shutdown of much of the country. For days, Fauci, Birx, and the other experts made the impassioned case that such a radical step was the only way to keep Americans away from each other to “stop the spread” and “flatten the curve” of infections. It was already beginning to happen anyway—state and local governments and private sector institutions were closing on their own. Finally, on March 16, Trump bowed to the inevitable and issued the guidance, though it stopped short of a federal mandate and other more stringent measures like those that many European countries were taking. “We will defeat the virus,” Trump promised.[15]
Just like that, the United States of America was closed.
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One of the worst-hit spots in the country was Queens, the borough where Trump grew up. He was shocked by televised images of a hospital he knew with a refrigerated truck outside to handle the overflow of bodies. But Trump only ever mentioned the personal toll of the pandemic when a major New York real estate developer he knew, Stanley Chera, died of the coronavirus, and even then, he did not dwell on it. To Trump, public displays of grief were a sign of weakness, and he was all about strength. He was “powerful,” the government was hitting the virus “strongly.” Dying was weak. To the extent that he discussed the coming wave of deaths, he did so in clinical and even prideful terms. “The only thing we haven’t done well,” he boasted the day after announcing the shutdown, “is get good press.”[16]
Ever sensitive to his press, it had taken Trump about a minute to recognize that handing over the coronavirus task force to Pence was one thing but handing the vice president the limelight was quite another. So Trump made a surprise appearance at a 5 p.m. briefing one day to address reporters himself, pushing Pence into the background. Then he came back the next day and the day after that.
For the next two months, Trump commanded the airwaves every night, conducting marathon sessions about the pandemic and anything else that came to mind. At first, he would go on for an hour a day, seven days a week; by the end, he was appearing in the White House briefing room for as long as two and a half hours at a time. The Covid briefings were the twenty-first-century equivalent of the Five O’Clock Follies during the Vietnam War when generals misled reporters each evening about the victory that was perennially just around the corner.
In the modern sequel, the disconnect between Trumpian narrative and actual reality was never on starker display than when the president patted himself on the back while emergency rooms and morgues filled up with sick and dying Americans. “I don’t take responsibility at all,” he declared at one briefing in March.[17] Asked to assess his own performance, he said, “I’d rate it a ten.”[18] He and his team had “done one hell of a job” and “it’s lucky that you have this group here right now for this problem or you wouldn’t even have a country left.”[19] Any problems were the fault of the governors or the media or China or Obama.
The daily follies not only showcased Trump at his Trumpiest but modeled the exact behavior the federal government was discouraging among other Americans. In announcing the shutdown, Trump had in theory endorsed social distancing guidelines urging Americans to stay at home, avoid gatherings of more than ten people, refrain from unnecessary travel, and stop going out to restaurants and bars. When out in public, they were to remain at least six feet apart from anyone outside their families. But there was Trump standing at the podium flanked by a half dozen or more advisers standing inches apart.
Only a handful of reporters were physically in the briefing room every day for Trump’s performances, not because the White House, which still resisted precautions, had imposed social distancing rules but because the correspondents themselves insisted upon it. Trump relished combat with the ones who were there, finding it easier to do battle with them than with the elusive virus.
“What do you say to Americans who are watching you right now and are scared?” Peter Alexander of NBC News asked one day.
Trump snapped: “I say that you’re a terrible reporter, that’s what I say.”[20]
The president made clear that governors desperate for help needed to genuflect to get it. When Andrew Cuomo of New York or Gavin Newsom of California, the Democratic governors of two of the biggest and most affected states, publicly thanked Trump for federal help, he lavished praise on them. When they complained they were not getting what they needed, he harshly attacked them. Other Democratic governors were frequent targets at the briefings or on his Twitter feed, including Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer and Washington state’s Jay Inslee. At one point, Trump openly admitted that he had told Mike Pence not to help governors who were insufficiently obsequious. “Don’t call the woman in Michigan,” he said. Asked what he wanted from the governors, he said bluntly, “I want them to be appreciative.”[21] (Whitmer scored points of her own a couple weeks later by going on the Trevor Noah comedy show wearing a T-shirt that said, “That Woman From Michigan.”)[22]
Throughout, Trump equivocated on just who was really in charge of the response to the disaster, claiming unfettered federal power when he wanted to call the shots and disclaiming responsibility when he wanted to pass the buck. One Sunday in April, he tweeted that governors had to get their act together on testing and medical equipment. “No excuses!” he declared. At his briefing the next day, Trump declared that he would be the one deciding when to reopen the country, not the governors. “They can’t do anything without the approval of the president of the United States.” Asked what gave him that power, he said, “When somebody’s the president of the United States, the authority is total.”[23] But then three days later, he told the governors it was up to them after all. “You’re going to call your own shots,” he told them on a conference call.[24]
