The Divider, page 72
Trump’s decision to give Morocco what it wanted was a case study in how policy was made in his White House. Until then, Trump had resisted making any concession on the Western Sahara out of deference to Senator Jim Inhofe, a Republican ally from Oklahoma and Washington’s most outspoken champion of the Polisario Front, the rebel movement fighting Moroccan occupation. But Trump was mad at Inhofe for unrelated reasons—as chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Inhofe was steering passage of the annual defense bill through the Senate but refused to put in a provision Trump wanted punishing social media companies or to take out a provision Trump opposed renaming military bases honoring Confederate generals.
So in buying off Morocco on behalf of Israel, Trump could also take revenge against Inhofe. For Trump, even making peace involved some element of making war. And for all of the fanfare on the resodded grass of the South Lawn as the Abraham Accords were signed, Trump’s goal that fall was not so much making peace as it was keeping control of the White House.
In theory, that was Kushner’s mission too. The Secretary of Everything was supposed to be riding herd on the campaign even as he was also dealing with the pandemic and police reform. He was the one who had to remove Brad Parscale as campaign manager and he was the one on the phone with Bill Stepien and Justin Clark, going over the budget and data in his cool analytical way.
But it was Trump who was deciding the message, not his son-in-law. Kushner’s attention was divided between the political battleground states of the Midwest and the geopolitical battlegrounds of the Middle East. After nearly four years in Washington, he found his passion in a diplomatic opportunity he could seize, not in a campaign whose fate was out of his control.
CHAPTER 27
The Altar of Trump
Heading into the final weeks of the campaign, Trump was fixated on one thing he was sure could guarantee his re-election and save his presidency: getting a vaccine against the coronavirus before November 3.
No matter his efforts to deny, dismiss, and generally make light of the virus, Trump knew he could not persuade enough Americans outside his hard-core fan base to simply pretend Covid was not a threat, not when nearly 200,000 people had already died, and there was no cure. So while he campaigned at mask-less rallies all but ignoring the pandemic, he pressured his public health officials to deliver rapid, pre-election approval for the shots.
The vaccine was to be the miracle solution that hydroxychloroquine had not been. Even after his relentless promotion of the drug blew up in his face, Trump had continued to take it himself that fall, according to a senior government official, despite telling the public that he had “finished” in May. But hydroxychloroquine would not make the pandemic go away nor would it rescue his campaign. For that, he was counting on Operation Warp Speed, an $18 billion initiative to speed development and eventual distribution of a vaccine. Trump enthusiastically supported it, although the idea had originated with one of the Deep State officials he disparaged, Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, who originally called it Project Warp Speed, in a nod to Star Trek.
By September, Trump had become increasingly explicit in demanding that the vaccine be released before the election, insisting that science meet his political timetable. On Labor Day, he touted progress of vaccine trials and promised approval would soon be forthcoming. The vaccine was “incredible,” he said, and “it’s going to be done in a very short period of time,” maybe as soon as October.[1] He continued to express optimism for the next couple weeks. “Vaccines are moving along fast and safely!” he tweeted in mid-September. A day later, he was so sure the vaccine would benefit him, he made it an attack line against the opposition. “The Democrats are just ANGRY that the vaccine and delivery are so far ahead of schedule. They hate what they are seeing. Saving lives should make them happy, not sad!”
Trump’s FDA commissioner, however, had a different plan. After months of what he considered inappropriate pressure from the president and his political team at the White House, Stephen Hahn had reached his breaking point with Trump. The president, in his quest to find another miracle drug when hydroxychloroquine did not work out, had fixated over the summer on a treatment for those who were already sick called convalescent plasma therapy. The idea was to use plasma drawn from blood donated by patients who had recovered from Covid to introduce antibodies into the system of those currently ailing. It was a well-established medical approach and the FDA had been testing it, but not quickly enough for Trump, who pressed at the last minute for it to be approved before the Republican National Convention opened.
Both Mark Meadows and Brad Smith, an adviser to Jared Kushner, called Hahn to lobby for immediate approval, and Trump personally called Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health, to make clear he wanted it done by the Friday before the convention. None of them was subtle about the political motivation behind the timing.
When action was not forthcoming, Trump took his grievance public on Saturday, August 22, two days before the convention. “The deep state, or whoever, over at the FDA is making it very difficult for drug companies to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics,” he tweeted. “Obviously, they are hoping to delay the answer until after November 3rd. Must focus on speed, and saving lives!”
In fact, as Trump learned later that day from Alex Azar, approval for plasma therapy was about to happen. The president insisted on making the announcement himself at the White House the following afternoon, just twenty-four hours before the convention would open. But even as Trump hailed the news with Azar and Hahn at his side, they overstated the treatment’s effectiveness and claimed the plasma had reduced deaths by 35 percent. A “tremendous” number, Trump declared. Hahn said that thirty-five out of 100 patients “would have been saved because of the administration of plasma.”[2] Except it was not true. The figure seemed to be calculated based on a small subgroup of patients under age eighty who were not on ventilators and received plasma within three days of diagnosis.
Hahn, who had earned his professional reputation as a rigorous research scientist, should have known better and was devastated by the resulting furor. It was a rookie mistake, he felt, made after enormous political pressure from the president. Hahn claimed that he had not even looked at the political calendar to understand why the president was so anxious, an omission for which he later declared himself “dumb as a doornail.” With his own credibility on the line and scientists within his agency furious about the repeated blows to their scientific integrity, Hahn decided to post a correction. “The criticism is entirely justified,” he wrote on Twitter on the first night of the convention. “What I should have said better is that the data show a relative risk reduction not an absolute risk reduction.”[3]
His tweet did not satisfy critics who thought it still misstated the data and it predictably infuriated Trump. But it was a turning point for Hahn. After months of battering, he was done with the president. He had bowed to the White House before, generating consternation by many within the FDA, but he now told others he understood that Trump was a bully, surrounded by other bullies like Meadows. He was determined not to cave in anymore—especially with the trustworthiness of a lifesaving vaccine on the line.
If you’re going to play this way, I’ve got to play a different way, he thought. We just do what we want. I’m going to go rogue.
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Trump’s tweet accusing “the deep state, or whoever” of trying to delay a vaccine until after the election set off alarms not just at the FDA but at the pharmaceutical companies developing the shots. Albert Bourla, the chief executive of Pfizer, was outraged. He had launched his own company’s Project Lightspeed nearly two months before Operation Warp Speed got underway and he was not about to allow his vaccine to be politicized. Trump’s tweet, he said later, was “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”[4] Bourla rallied his counterparts at eight other drug companies to issue a joint public pledge in fourteen newspapers on September 8 vowing to “only submit for approval” any new vaccines “after demonstrating safety and efficacy.”[5] They would not be rushed by a president seeking to salvage his flailing election hopes.
The industry declaration bolstered Hahn and his FDA to resist Trump’s escalating pressure. Over the summer, the agency had been finalizing its rules for emergency approval of the vaccines. Hahn and Peter Marks, whose center was in charge of evaluating the vaccines, had been particularly concerned about the risk-benefit ratio, given that the vaccines would be used for presumably healthy people, and determined that a minimum of sixty days of follow-up would be required after conclusion of Stage 3 trials to ensure there were no dangerous side effects. It was already September, which meant that sixty days would make it impossible for vaccine approval before the election.
But Trump and his political officials seemed oblivious to what was coming. When the draft guidelines leaked to The Washington Post on September 22 with a headline pointing out the timetable for vaccine approval made it “unlikely one will be cleared by Election Day,” Trump erupted.[6] He accused Hahn and the rest of the agency of “colluding to prevent his re-election,” as the FDA commissioner later told associates.
In public, Trump was alternately incredulous and defiant. “I don’t see any reason why it should be delayed further,” he tweeted. He later hinted that he would personally block the FDA from adopting the sixty-day standard. “That has to be approved by the White House,” he said, adding, “We may or we may not approve it”—comments that further shook confidence at a time when the public was increasingly worried that Trump would rush the shots heedless of the risks.[7] Polls showed the number of Americans saying they were ready to take a vaccine had fallen from 72 percent in the spring to 51 percent in September.[8]
The subsequent bombardment of the FDA chief, now referred to by Trump as “that fucking Hahn,” was relentless, including multiple phone calls from Trump, Meadows, and Kushner’s adviser, as well as face-to-face meetings—all focused on getting Hahn to change the sixty-day timetable so the vaccine could be approved before the election.[9] Once again, the White House officials did not bother to hide their political motivation and accused Hahn of “sabotaging the election effort.” Had the intense pressure campaign become public at the time, it almost certainly would have further reduced public faith in the shots. But Hahn, finally, refused to relent. “I was adamant about the fact that we weren’t going to change one word of that document,” he would later tell associates. “I absolutely refused because I knew that the minute we changed one word in that guidance people would not trust our process.”
The hectoring phone calls would continue as would Trump’s public claims that the vaccine was imminent, but as a practical matter the fight was over. Legally, it appeared unlikely that the president could overrule the FDA on an emergency use decision that required “scientific evidence” and certification that it was in the public health interest. And while Trump could fire Hahn, that would be a disaster in the heat of the fall campaign. And so, by the end of September, Trump’s best hope to revive his rapidly shrinking chances to win a second term was effectively dashed. Hahn had gone rogue and won.
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With no magic end to the pandemic in sight and only weeks until the election, even the Trump campaign’s internal surveys of seventeen battleground states showed a win was unlikely. Brad Parscale, the former campaign manager demoted to running campaign data before being iced out altogether, told others that more than 90 percent of voters had made up their minds by August.
But if Trump could not win, he had no intention of losing either. He preemptively declared the election the most crooked in history—unless he won. For months, he had been laying the groundwork to dispute any result other than his own victory. He began calling the contest “rigged” in May, months before any votes were cast.
This was an old playbook for Trump. Anytime he was beaten in any kind of contest he cried foul. When The Apprentice lost an Emmy to The Amazing Race in 2004, he complained that the awards were a con game. “We were robbed!” he fumed as he stormed out of the auditorium. “They cheated us!”[10] When Republicans lost the 2012 presidential race, he called the election “a total sham.” When Ted Cruz beat him in the Iowa caucuses in 2016, he cried “fraud,” and claimed that “Cruz didn’t win Iowa, he stole it.” In the fall of that year, fearing he would lose to Hillary Clinton, he said the outcome was “absolutely being rigged”—until he actually won. Even then, while victorious in the Electoral College, he claimed that Clinton’s three-million-vote margin in the popular vote was fraudulent, an assertion for which his own handpicked commission found no evidence. A search of Trump’s public statements on the Factbase website going back to 2012 found that he had questioned voting or suggested that an election would be rigged, unfair, or otherwise compromised 713 times.[11] And that was before Labor Day.
Over the summer, as it became increasingly clear that the pandemic was going to lead to a historic increase in voting by mail and states were working to make it easier, Trump had even proposed postponing the fall election, saying it would be the most “INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history.” Why should the United States not “Delay the Election,” he asked, “until people can properly, securely and safely vote???” While Republican leaders including Mitch McConnell and Liz Cheney forcefully shot down that proposal and made clear the election would take place as it had even during times of war, Trump continued to inveigh against mail-in ballots and new state laws facilitating them, never mind that he himself had voted by mail during Florida’s primary earlier in the year. His newly installed postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, a major Trump donor, imposed sharp cutbacks at the Postal Service and warned states of slower than normal turnaround time for absentee ballots. The election results, Trump insisted in September, “MAY NEVER BE ACCURATELY DETERMINED” because of more voting by mail.
On September 23, just a day after Trump’s hopes for a pre-election reprieve from the pandemic with a vaccine were dashed, he went even further.
“Win, lose, or draw in this election, will you commit here today to making sure for a peaceful transferral of power after the election?” Brian Karem, a correspondent for Playboy, asked at a news conference.
“Well, we’re going to have to see what happens,” he responded noncommittally. “You know that I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots. And the ballots are a disaster.” Pressed, he added, “Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very—we’ll have a very peaceful—there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There’ll be a continuation.”[12]
The closer the election came, the more Trump embraced extreme positions. Rather than toning down his divisive rhetoric, he amped it up. At every turn, Trump now spoke of Red America, the true America, versus the “badly managed, high crime, Blue States,” as he put it in a September tweet. At one point in mid-September, he argued that the Covid death toll was not so bad—as long as states that voted for Democrats were not counted. “If you take the blue states out, we’re at a level that I don’t think anybody in the world would be at,” he said.[13] He even personally ordered a review of federal aid with the goal of withholding funds from “anarchist” Democratic-run cities that allowed “themselves to deteriorate into lawless zones.”[14]
He broadcast so much misinformation that fall that Twitter for the first time regularly warned readers that some of his posts were misleading. He lied so much that The New York Times found 131 of his statements during a single rally false or misleading.[15] He also issued orders threatening to politicize the government even after he was gone, including an executive order to remove key protections from the professional civil service; the potential consequences of this move were so significant that the Republican Trump appointee charged with overseeing it resigned in protest, warning that the decision would “replace apolitical expertise with political obeisance.”[16]
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No matter how besieged he felt, Trump remained a believer in his own destiny. He could not be counted out and even many political pros thought Biden at the end of September was just a bad debate, a campaign stumble or two, and an October surprise away from a repeat of Trump’s 2016 shocker. On September 18, fate seemed to intervene again on Trump’s behalf when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died at the age of eighty-seven after a long battle with cancer.
Ginsburg, a liberal icon, had famously and, as it turned out, unwisely refused to retire during Barack Obama’s second term. Now Trump insisted he would name a replacement and work with Mitch McConnell to get a new justice confirmed regardless of how close it was to the election. The opening gave Trump a rare shot to name three members of the court in a single term and decisively shift it to a six-to-three conservative majority for a generation.
On Saturday, September 26, Trump held a ceremony to announce his nomination of Amy Coney Barrett, a Notre Dame law professor and appeals court judge from Indiana, packing the Rose Garden with unmasked supporters seated closely together. Barrett’s selection was no real surprise, coming two years after Trump had privately told the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo that he was holding her in reserve in case he got to fill Ginsburg’s seat. She was a favorite of anti-abortion conservatives, a former clerk of the late Justice Antonin Scalia and just forty-eight years old, meaning she could serve for decades.
But the timing was unprecedented, another busted norm in a presidency full of them. Trump wanted Barrett confirmed just days before the election, after millions of Americans would have already cast early ballots. There would barely be time for hearings or even the pretense of a process in the Senate, where McConnell obligingly arranged a lightning-fast confirmation only four years after denying Obama’s final Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, a hearing because the nomination came eight months before the 2016 presidential election. Trump would eventually be extraordinarily blunt in admitting that he wanted to push Barrett’s nomination through so close to November 3 to ensure his own victory. “I think this will end up in the Supreme Court,” Trump said of the election, “and I think it’s very important that we have nine justices,” rather than risk a four-to-four tie. Trump appeared to believe that, with three of his appointees on the bench, they would surely swing the outcome his way if necessary.[17]
