Rage

by Bob Woodward

  “It’s more complicated than I thought,” Kushner told others.

  Obtaining the funding had proved difficult. Trump worked every lever of the federal government. He got into a standoff with Congress, leading to a 35-day government shutdown in December 2018 and January 2019—the country’s longest. He declared a national emergency in February 2019 to force a release of funds from the Department of Defense, fighting legal battles at every stage and ultimately winning a 5 to 4 Supreme Court case in July 2019.

  They had muscled the system and busted through it, Kushner said. “The system’s designed to do nothing.”

  Liberated from constraints, they moved money from Pentagon budgets for construction and antidrug programs to pay for the wall. “We looked under every seat cushion and found all the money we needed,” Kushner said.

  The wall was also not being built exactly where Trump had wanted. Instead, it was being built in what the CBP had identified for Trump and Kushner as high-traffic areas. “It is a smart wall,” Kushner said. CBP had drones, sensors and cameras, so they covered more ground with fewer people. Illegal border crossings were down. Drug seizures were up. Kushner hoped the return on investment might mean the wall would pay for itself.

  Every two weeks, Kushner gave Trump an update on wall construction. The president was not interested in incremental progress.

  “Get the fucking thing done,” Trump said.

  * * *

  Kushner considered one of Trump’s greatest skills “figuring out how to trigger the other side by picking fights with them where he makes them take stupid positions.”

  He recalled Trump’s July 27, 2019, tweets about the district represented by the late Black Democratic congressman Elijah Cummings, which included Baltimore. “Cumming District is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess,” Trump had tweeted. “No human being would want to live there.”

  Kushner saw this as baiting the Democrats. “When he did the tweet on Elijah Cummings, the president was saying, this is great, let them defend Baltimore,” Kushner told an associate. “The Democrats are getting so crazy, they’re basically defending Baltimore. When you get to the next election, he’s tied them to all these stupid positions because they’d rather attack him than actually be rational.”

  Cummings’s former district is in the top half of congressional districts in median household income, home prices and education levels. It has the second-highest income of any majority-Black congressional district in the country.

  Chris Wallace had Mick Mulvaney, then the acting White House chief of staff, on his Sunday show the next day. “This seems, Mick,” Wallace said, “to be the worst kind of racial stereotype—”

  Mulvaney tried to interrupt.

  “Let me finish,” Wallace said, “Racial stereotyping. Black congressman, majority-Black district—I mean, ‘No human being would want to live there’? Is he saying people that live in Baltimore are not human beings?”

  “I think you’re spending way too much time reading between the lines,” Mulvaney said.

  “I’m not reading between the lines,” Wallace replied. “I’m reading the lines.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  On the morning of Friday, February 28, eight months before election day 2020, Trump’s longtime campaign manager Brad Parscale was feeling confident. At times, he was exuberant. With a bushy, honey-red beard, a full 6-foot-8, he sat comfortably in his 14th-floor office at Trump campaign headquarters in Virginia. The backdrop was a sweeping, panoramic view of the Potomac River.

  “I’m a master brander,” Parscale told several staff members and visitors that day. He said Trump set the themes of campaigning and governing, and Parscale’s operation converted those themes, along with Trump’s tweets, into a massive, unmatched media blitz of messaging and fundraising.

  Put another way, Parscale said, “The president is the radio and the music. We’re the amplifier.” Once in a while, Parscale said, his job for Trump would make him what he called “the songwriter.” He would say, “Hey, here are a few things you should look at.”

  The campaign was rolling on at a feverish pace. Using artificial intelligence, Pascale’s operation would test up to 100,000 message variables in a single day. For example, they tested whether a red or green press-to-donate button raised more money in fundraising. In ten seconds, the AI models could tell them how a particular ad performed compared to the last four million that had been run before it.

  They had almost twenty $1 million fundraising days in a row lately. Trump’s State of the Union address, held on February 4, had been the biggest day of the year so far, with $5.3 million raised.

  Parscale, now 44, was one of the 2016 campaign’s first hires and had stayed, working on media, as Trump hired and fired campaign managers.

  “A blessing in disguise was his daughter’s marriage to Jared,” Parscale said. “I think Jared Kushner was the operator that he needed—the yin to his yang. A detail guy. Jared’s meticulous.”

  Trump needed two important personality types, in Parscale’s estimation. “Somebody to be meticulous with the details to make sure the organization’s right.” That was Kushner. “Number two, someone to understand his brand and marketing and sell his vision. That’s me.” There was a clear division of labor.

  “I run everything political outside the White House. Ronna McDaniel, the RNC chairwoman, runs everything for the party and then Jared runs everything inside the White House.”

  Parscale knew the connection between Trump’s tweets and the ads. “Think of Trump’s head more like a starting point of every root narrative we have. In 2016 I made 5.9 million ads on Facebook. It was only about 35 root narratives. That’s what the media’s never gotten wrapped around their head.”

  Parscale was so proud of the campaign he was managing that he said, “They’ll make movies about us someday.”

  He said Trump’s impeachment in the House of Representatives and Senate acquittal led to a million new donors. The reward was “money and data.” The average donation to the Trump campaign in the fourth quarter of 2019 was $40.87. Kushner calls this a “data-palooza,” a term Parscale embraces.

  Three years earlier Parscale had urged Trump to get organized. “Sir, get out there and get out there early. Being president is an advantage, but it’s how soon you do it that’s the advantage.” Trump filed FEC documents on inauguration day and quickly followed up with a February 2017 rally in Florida.

  “I do a lot of things that people in politics think are counterintuitive but they’ve worked really well. Become campaign manager 1,400 days before it starts. I’m the longest campaign manager in history.”

  The ability to contact voters, even low-propensity voters, had increased over the years. Previously the campaigns had to send someone to knock on a door or send mail, which was expensive. Parscale said now he could contact someone on their phone a hundred times for about 11 cents.

  Which Democrats caused Trump the most trouble? “The more mainstream. The more they appeal to moderates. Look, this election is about moderates. That’s who determines elections.”

  At this point he said he thought there would be three main issues in the campaign—the economy, immigration and health care.

  Parscale conducted focus groups in 12 different cities in eight states all over the country with over 1,000 people about the presidential race.

  One question was: Would you vote for someone you like but don’t agree with his policies, or would you vote for someone you don’t like but you like his policies?

  “One hundred percent said, I’ll vote for the guy I don’t like, but like his policies. One thousand to zero.”

  Whether true or not, it seemed to be his strong view. Here was the paradox, according to Parscale. Trump believed “presence is so important. He’d say it’s probably more important how I look when I give a speech than the speech I give.”

  Parscale added a corollary: “You get a picture with the president of China. It’s more important than whatever you did there�
�� in the meeting. The average voter would think, “Oh, the president’s in China. I feel safe. We’re not going to war with them.”

  As Parscale described it, Trump had a power to persuade that is almost mystical.

  “Now I’ve finally known him so long, I come back and I say, you did that. I know what you did to me.” Trump had made him see what he wanted him to see—such as toughness, but no war with China, Russia or North Korea. “He’s like, I was right though. And I was like, yeah, you were right.”

  On election night, Trump told him, “Don’t stand next to me.” Trump was supposedly 6-foot-3, and Parscale was five inches taller. Appearance mattered. Appearance defined. There were few photos of the two together.

  After the 2020 election, Parscale said, “My guess is there will be a huge rush of people wanting to befriend me. A lot of people think he’s going to win. And in theory I have the key to the biggest data trove that’s ever existed.”

  He added, “They’d have to offer me a lot of money though. I’m not doing this for free.”

  A visitor asked Parscale where the hole in reelection might be. “The coronavirus,” he said emphatically. The main headline in The New York Times that day was “Coronavirus Fears Drive Stocks Down for 6th Day.”

  Sixty-four cases had been confirmed in the United States. The day before, Trump had said during remarks in the Cabinet Room, “It’s going to disappear. One day—it’s like a miracle—it will disappear.”

  To Parscale, the worry was jobs, not the influence the virus had on the stock market. “We never gained any votes from the stock market,” he said. “If the stock market affects jobs, then we lose. Votes are for jobs and personal incomes.”

  Parscale stuck to his main worry. “The coronavirus. The thing you never see. The president kind of said this before: It’s a long hallway and every day I open new doors. And one day I’m going to open a door and there’s going to be a piece of dynamite behind it.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  Two days after giving a green light to a weekend movie and a workout at the gym, Fauci appeared on MSNBC on March 2 sounding subdued and wearing a white coat.

  “We’re dealing with an evolving situation,” he said. The disease had “now reached outbreak proportions and likely pandemic proportions, if you look at multiple definitions of what a pandemic is. The fact is, this is multiple sustained transmissions of a highly infectious agent in multiple regions of the globe.”

  * * *

  Redfield monitored the CDC’s influenza-like illness surveillance network, which took in daily reports from health institutions across the country, tracking influenza types A and B. This would let epidemiologists anticipate when the flu was coming. Redfield looked at the beautiful curves it produced: influenza B peaked, and then fell. Influenza A peaked, and then fell. Now, in March, it was on its way down as flu season ended. But then a third peak appeared. Redfield had never seen a third peak before.

  On March 3, Trump visited the National Institutes of Health in Maryland, where he was photographed speaking with doctors wearing white coats in a room bristling with scientific equipment—just as campaign manager Brad Parscale had advised. Three days later Trump toured the CDC in Atlanta, Georgia, in a red “Keep America Great” campaign hat, khaki pants and an open-necked shirt under a bomber jacket.

  Speaking at the CDC, Trump promised, “Anybody that needs a test can have a test,” seeming to contradict widespread reporting about the difficulty of being tested. Administration officials later worked to clarify that people need to go through their doctors or public health officials to access testing.

  “We’re not blind where this virus is right now in the United States,” Redfield told reporters as he stood beside Trump. “I tell people, every time we see a new confirmed case, they should think of that as a success, because they know their public health community is out doing their job.”

  Chief among the lessons Redfield had learned from his days researching HIV was not to get ahead of the data. HIV was initially thought to only be transmitted by homosexual sex. Early on he questioned this and coauthored studies demonstrating it could be transmitted heterosexually as well. As important as it was to let people know what kind of road a disease would take them down, to prepare them, the moment he got ahead of the data, he would lose his credibility. When the CDC spoke, he wanted people to listen. He told people he was a data guy, not an opinion guy.

  * * *

  Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, a brash Twitter-using nationalist whom Trump had labeled the “Trump of the Tropics,” was in Florida in early March and wanted to come to Mar-a-Lago to see Trump. National Security Adviser O’Brien was cutting back on foreign visits for the president because it looked like the virus was becoming a concern in the United States.

  An exception was made for Bolsonaro. A photo opportunity was arranged, but it morphed into a dinner for Saturday night, March 7.

  Trump and Bolsonaro sat at a table with O’Brien, Ivanka, Kushner and some of the other Brazilians traveling with Bolsonaro. O’Brien was later notified that three of the Brazilians at the table, but not Bolsonaro, tested positive for Covid-19.

  After this became public, Bolsonaro downplayed the virus as part of a “fantasy.”

  O’Brien had an entirely different reaction. He worried he might be a historical footnote as the person responsible for exposing Trump to the virus or passing it directly to him. He spent a lot of time with Trump. There was not lots of testing available then, but he arranged to be tested. He was negative. Later, Bolsonaro tested positive. The virus was starting to feel real.

  * * *

  On March 9, with the stock market reeling, Trump tweeted, “Last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!”

  * * *

  The New York Times headline the morning of Tuesday, March 10: “Markets Spiral as Globe Shudders Over Virus.” The markets had plunged the day before. The Times wrote it was “their sharpest drop in more than a decade.”

  In remarks to reporters following a meeting with Republican senators, Trump said, “We’re doing a great job with it. And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.” Virus cases in the United States were up by more than 200 from the day before.

  * * *

  O’Brien watched TV in his office, flipping between the cable networks. Italy was getting worse. There were images of people bleeding out and dying in the parking lots of Italian hospitals, not able to get in. This, in a major Western country with relatively good health care.

  As the virus was spreading rapidly across Europe, O’Brien called several of his counterparts there—national security advisers or equivalents. The Chinese travel restrictions were having significant impact. In January before the restrictions, some 500,000 travelers had come from China to the U.S. In February there was an 86 percent reduction to 70,000.

  We’ve stopped most travel from China, O’Brien told his counterparts. You should do the same.

  The response was that this was an issue for the European Union in Brussels. Europe had to respond collectively.

  Italy was being hit hard and had on March 9 imposed restrictions nationwide on domestic travel. Nearly 140,000 had come from Italy to the United States the previous month. Another 1.74 million had come from the other European countries such as France and Germany.

  O’Brien was worried there was a hole in the original travel restrictions from China. Many of the Chinese who would have come to the United States were it not for the travel restrictions had instead traveled to Europe.

  The other key player recently appointed to the team was Dr. Deborah Birx, whose decorated career as a physician, HIV/AIDS researcher and diplomat in federal government spanned more than 40 years. She was named the response coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force. Birx had spent most of her career in the search for a vacc
ine for HIV, and in 2003 had helped lead the clinical trial that produced the first evidence of any vaccine to be effective in lowering the risk of HIV. Also the U.S. global AIDS coordinator at the State Department, she had worked closely with Fauci and Redfield throughout her career.

  Birx reported that 35 states had Covid-19 cases now and 30 of those had been traced to travelers that had come from Europe, primarily through John F. Kennedy Airport.

  O’Brien, Pottinger, Fauci and Redfield thought it was well past time to restrict travel from Europe.

  A meeting was scheduled with Trump for the morning of March 11.

  At the time, Kushner was intensely focused on an initiative to plant one trillion trees. Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, had brought the idea to Kushner, who brought it to Trump. “Everyone is pro-tree,” Benioff said. Trump had made it one of the endless stream of tasks he had assigned to Kushner who was throwing himself into it with typical business-school efficiency.

  But now the word came from his father-in-law that he needed immediate help on the mounting Covid-19 crisis.

  In the Oval Office that morning, there was a consensus among the national security and health officials that they needed to act immediately to close down travel from Europe.

  Treasury Secretary Mnuchin was opposed. Travel from Europe was about five times that from China. “This is going to bankrupt everyone,” he said dramatically. “It’s going to destroy the economy.”

  “What data are you relying on for that?” asked Birx. “You’ve been asking me for my data. What data do you have?”

  Mnuchin said that was how the economy and markets worked.

  Trump eventually approved the travel restrictions. They would be consistent with his decision on China.

  Kushner assisted with drafting the prime-time television address that Trump had decided to give that night from the Oval Office. It was only the second of his presidency. A nationally televised evening address gave the speech the stamp of important business.