by Bob Woodward
“And in one day, this thing came in and we had a choice to make,” Trump continued. “Close everything up and save potentially millions of lives—you know, hundreds of thousands of lives—or don’t do anything and look at body bags every day being taken out of apartment buildings.”
“Who told you that?” I asked.
“It was me,” Trump said. “I told me that.”
As he led the nation through the crisis, Trump showed few signs of introspection.
“Was there a moment in all of this, last two months, where you said to yourself—you know, you’re waking up or whatever you’re doing and you say, ah, this is the leadership test of a lifetime?” I asked.
“No,” he answered.
“No?”
“I think it might be, but I don’t think that. All I want to do is get it solved.”
I brought up Trump’s comments at a press briefing the previous week, when he had said “I don’t take responsibility at all” for the crisis.
“I don’t take responsibility for this,” Trump told me. “I have nothing to do with this. I take responsibility for solving the problem. But I don’t take responsibility for this, no. We did a good job. The Obama administration—they were obsolete tests. And in all fairness to them, nobody ever thought in terms of millions of people.”
I could find no support for Trump’s claim, repeated several times in public remarks, that the Obama administration left behind “obsolete” or “broken” tests. Obama’s National Security Council had left behind a 69-page document titled “Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents” that included instructions for dealing with novel influenza viruses which “would produce an estimate of between 700,000 and 1.4 billion fatalities from a pandemic of a virulent influenza virus strain.” The document recommended officials in the early stages of such a pandemic check the nation’s diagnostic testing capacity and the amount of personal protective equipment available for health care workers.
Complaints about a lack of preparation were universal. For two years Redfield had testified before Congress that the country was not prepared for a large health crisis. When a 2018 report on the Zika virus, West Nile virus and other diseases caused by insect bites was released, Redfield said, “We don’t know what will threaten Americans next.”
Shortly before midnight on March 22, Trump tweeted in all-caps, “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF. AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO!”
* * *
In late March, Kushner and Pence had a meeting with the data people at FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. They gave Kushner a list showing the country would need 130,000 ventilators by April 1. The message sank in. It meant possibly 130,000 people were going to die because he didn’t get them a ventilator. It meant the situation soon could mirror that in Italy, where doctors were choosing who lived and who died. In Kushner’s view people dying on hospital gurneys because they couldn’t get ventilators was not politically survivable.
Pence saw Kushner was disturbed. “Come for a ride back,” he said. So Kushner and Pence rode back to the White House together. “Jared,” Pence said, “we’ll figure it out.”
Kushner broke the news about the ventilators to Trump, who later called it the scariest day of his life and said he told the team to “move heaven and earth” to get the ventilators.
Kushner gathered White House economists and data modelers he knew from the private sector in the Roosevelt Room. They pulled Medicare and Medicaid data and went hospital by hospital, getting the highest number of ventilators the hospital had ever billed for at one time, then aggregated the numbers on a state-by-state basis. Before FEMA sent out more ventilators, Kushner said, it would need to ask how many ventilators were in the state, how many anesthesia machines had the state converted to ventilators, and what was the state’s daily utilization rate?
Kushner’s team predeployed ventilators so that every time they got to about 96 hours away from running out, they sent them another 500. New York and New Jersey came close a few times on ventilators.
New York governor Andrew Cuomo was holding daily press conferences that were getting high marks, and he loudly complained about the lack of ventilators, at one point saying New York needed 40,000 more ventilators.
Trump called Kushner. Jared, why aren’t you sending out more ventilators?
Cuomo was wrong, Kushner said. He and his team had checked by calling the New York hospitals. No one in New York was 96 hours away from needing a ventilator, Kushner said.
* * *
On March 26, a reporter asked Trump about the language he used to describe the virus. “I talk about the Chinese virus and—and I mean it. That’s where it came from,” he said. “And this was a Chinese virus.”
Later that day, Trump and Xi spoke again by phone about the virus. At the start of the call, Trump discussed comments by the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman that the virus had been brought to China by an American soldier. This is a ridiculous comment, you know, Trump said. It was tense, and they argued.
Xi pivoted to a different topic. French president Emmanuel Macron wanted to hold a meeting of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council. The leaders discussed the potential meeting before the conversation moved back to the virus.
Xi said China was on the other side of its peak, and new case numbers had dropped significantly. He claimed any new cases in China were imported. Trump and Pottinger, who was listening on the call, knew this was not true at all.
Xi called the virus the common enemy and said his health minister would contact Azar, his American counterpart, to share best practices.
Trump asked Xi what was effective in fighting against the virus. What medicines and therapeutics were working for China?
Lockdowns, quarantine and social distancing were effective, Xi replied. He claimed the lockdown in Wuhan had prevented the spread of the virus to the rest of the world. Early discovery, early testing, early quarantine and early treatment were helpful, he said.
It would help, Xi added, if U.S. officials—many of whom had borrowed the “Chinese virus” phrase from Trump—adjusted their comments. He expressed concern about anti-Chinese sentiment.
Trump said that he personally and the American people loved the Chinese people and would never tolerate mistreatment of people visiting from China.
The two leaders spent the remainder of the call discussing the virus and treatments for it.
Why is the fatality rate so high in Wuhan? Trump asked.
Xi replied that it was because of the proportion of elderly people in Wuhan, and the high concentration of cases.
The call ended cordially, with Xi inviting the president and first lady to visit once the virus had passed and Trump again thanking him for the offer.
Although Xi did not make any direct threat, Pottinger thought he had suggested a cause-and-effect relationship between the tone of U.S. official statements and the degree of cooperation China would provide. He also thought it was outrageous—and part of the cover-up—that China had not provided virus samples as required by international agreement.
During the next day’s briefing, Trump alluded to his call with Xi and said, “You can call it a germ, you can call it a flu, you can call it a virus. You know, you can call it many different names. I’m not sure anybody even knows what it is.”
* * *
On March 27, Trump met with Pence, O’Brien, Kushner and Larry Kudlow, the chief White House economic adviser who had succeeded Gary Cohn, in the Oval Office to discuss using the Defense Production Act on 3M.
The shortage of protective face masks for medical workers was a full-blown crisis. The stockpile was about 40 million masks—1 percent of what was needed.
“On masks,” Kushner said to the president, “there’s no way we can scale to the capacity we need here in America in the time we’re going to need it. If we want to get
the product we need to get through the next couple of weeks, China is the only answer.” China manufactured about 80 percent of the world’s face masks. “So you’ve got to decide how you want to play this.”
Call your contact, Trump said.
Kushner phoned Cui Tiankai, the 67-year-old, gray-haired Chinese ambassador to the United States. Cui had been in his post in Washington for an astonishing seven years. A Chinese Foreign Ministry veteran, Cui had done graduate work in the United States at Johns Hopkins, and he spoke perfect English. Kushner and Cui, both devoted networkers, had arranged the first meeting between Trump and Chinese president Xi at Mar-a-Lago in 2017. It was a useful relationship to both.
“Right now,” Kushner said in a call to Cui, “we’re in this situation.” Trump had been publicly referring to the “Chinese virus” as conspiracy theories piled one on top of another. Given its own overwhelming virus crisis, China was restricting exports of protective medical equipment, including the masks. The 75-cent masks were one of the most effective ways to contain the virus.
Kushner proposed to Cui some reputation and national image management. “When we get out of this, there’s going to be a lot of people very angry with China. And how you guys act now with a lot of the materials that are made in China is going to be looked at very carefully by the country and the world.”
Kushner asked directly, “Do you hold over people’s head the fact that a lot of global manufacturing of this is in the country?”
Kushner added, “So I just want to put that out there to you and let you know that this is something that’s going to be watched very closely.”
Kushner had a remedy. “I’m going to start working to find supply here, and I want to make sure that I’m not going to have any restrictions getting out the supply that I’m able to procure in China.”
* * *
“I’m running a big, big operation,” the president said when I reached him again by phone on Saturday morning, March 28.
The country had surpassed 2,000 deaths and officially had more reported cases than any other country. The day before, Trump had signed a $2 trillion pandemic response bill.
“The world is under siege, as you know,” he said. “I think we’re doing a good job. It’s unbelievable, though.” He sounded beleaguered. “What’s your feeling?”
“The leadership task that’s on your shoulders,” I began.
“Yeah.”
“People are going to be looking at this and trying to understand it a hundred years from now,” I said. My question for that history was, “What are your priorities?”
“There’s a lot of really fake news out,” he answered, retreating to his first talking point. He complained for a time about the media.
“The question though is what—because it’s on your shoulders,” I tried again. “What are your priorities?”
“My priorities are saving lives,” he said. “That’s my only priority.”
I reminded him he’d said that he discussed how this began with President Xi. “Did he have an answer?”
“Right,” Trump said. “Well, I did, and I discussed it. And then I said, look, it’s no longer relevant right now. We’ll talk about it after it’s all over. Because in the meantime we have to fix what’s here. But there’s no reason to get into a big argument about that now. Sometimes you just sort of say, okay, let’s talk about that sometime later. They’re very defensive, as they probably—as you would be.”
“When we talked in February, you said there’s dynamite behind every door,” I said. “And this is before all of this accelerated. And I wonder if at that point did you have any inkling or intelligence that my God, we’ve got this storm coming?”
“Well nobody knew that a thing like this could happen,” Trump said. “The best decision I made was Europe and China, closing our doors. We would’ve had a much bigger problem, like many times bigger than we had. We would’ve had unbelievable amounts of death.”
“Fauci is predicting we may have 100,000 deaths in this country,” I said.
“It could happen,” he said. “And if we didn’t do what I’m doing, you would’ve had a number many times that. Can you believe that?”
“How’s Xi’s mood?” I asked. “Because they’ve been clobbered also.”
“They’ve been clobbered far worse than you read,” the president said.
“I understand that it shows in North Korea they’re being clobbered also.” North Korea had publicly claimed it didn’t have a single case of the virus.
“Like you wouldn’t believe,” Trump said. “We haven’t had a war,” he reminded me. “Okay? And then you have something like this. And this stops wars, because they’ve got their own war now.”
“Somebody told me that the virus is just blazing through North Korea,” I said.
“Yeah. A big problem. Iran is an unbelievable problem.”
China had blamed American soldiers for bringing in the virus. Trump said he told President Xi, “Look, you can’t do that. And you know, we had a little bit of an argument.”
I understood that Trump’s decision to publicly call coronavirus the “Chinese virus” had led some White House staffers to feel emboldened to criticize China even harder. Trump was worried because he knew words could cause wars. He had told them, “You can’t do that shit,” and stopped them fast.
The scale of the problem had clearly sunk in. Trump almost sounded like a different person.
* * *
As the end of the “15 Days to Slow the Spread” inched closer, Trump said he wanted to reopen the country for Easter. We really want to have people at church, he said.
“I’m a Catholic,” Fauci said. “I went to Catholic schools. I understand the importance of Easter, but I’m a little concerned that if you want to have people go back to churches on Easter, that might not be a good idea.”
I don’t know, Trump said. I’d love to be able to do that. Nice, beautiful churches, he said. Beautiful mass. It’s a really sunny day. Okay, Trump said. Let’s get back to this and see what we’re going to do.
* * *
Fauci and Birx returned a few days later, right at the end of the 15 days. They needed to extend the time of the shutdown and advocated for another 30 days to “slow the spread.”
“Mr. President, that’s a nonstarter,” Fauci said of reopening the country for Easter. “You can’t do that.” After 15 days, they couldn’t know if they’d had any impact. It was premature. “We’ve got to go to 30 more days.”
Trump turned to Fauci and Birx. You guys feel really strongly about this?
Mr. President, they said, we really do need to do it. Because we may start to see a flattening of the curve, and then you’ll come back and say, you know, it was a really good thing for us to do this.
Okay, we’ll go with it, Trump said. I hope you guys are right.
Okay, Fauci said. I think we are.
* * *
Trump announced the 30-day extension on March 29. Fauci said modeling showed the U.S. could be in excess of a million cases and deaths could exceed 100,000 without mitigation efforts. “I mean, you could make a big sound bite about it, but the fact is it’s possible,” Fauci said. “What we’re trying to do is not let that happen.”
Trump added, “If we can hold that down, as we’re saying, to 100,000—that’s a horrible number—and maybe even less, but to 100,000, so we have between 100- and 200,000—we all, together, have done a very good job.”
At the next day’s briefing, Trump said, “Stay calm. It will go away. You know it—you know it is going away, and it will go away. And we’re going to have a great victory.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
April began with dire headlines about the latest White House task force models, released March 31, predicting 100,000 to 240,000 deaths nationwide even with mitigation measures like social distancing, and 1.5 million to 2.2 million without mitigation.
Trump seemed to be on a war against rules. On April 3, when the CDC issued new guidance recomm
ending that Americans wear masks, Trump said at the Coronavirus Task Force briefing that day, “This is voluntary. I don’t think I’m going to be doing it.”
The death toll in the United States had reached 7,000 and the number of new cases was rising by a staggering 30,000 each day.
“I’m feeling good,” Trump added later in the briefing. “I just don’t want to be doing—I don’t know, somehow sitting in the Oval Office behind that beautiful Resolute Desk—the great Resolute Desk—I think wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens, I don’t know. Somehow, I don’t see it for myself.”
Away from the cameras, however, the president’s mood was grim.
* * *
“The plague,” President Trump said when I reached him by phone late in the afternoon of April 5, 2020, Palm Sunday.
The president had given up on his plan to open the country by Easter. He sounded resigned, almost chastened, with a solemn tone unlike any I had heard in our previous nine interviews.
“It’s a horrible thing. It’s unbelievable. Can you believe it? It moves rapidly and viciously. If you’re the wrong person and if it gets you, your life is pretty much over if you’re in the wrong group. It’s our age group.”
He was 73, and I had recently turned 77.
I had prepared a list of 14 critical areas where my sources said major action was needed. My goal was to cover all 14 in our interview and find out what Trump thought and might have planned. Given the risks and hazards, I believed this could not be a standard interview. I wanted to lay it out as starkly and candidly as I could. Was he organized? Was there a plan?
“Are we going to go to full mobilization?” I asked. “People I talk to say they want that feeling of full mobilization. No one is going to say Trump did too much. There’s never too much.”