by Bob Woodward
“Okay,” Fauci said, “so if that’s the case we’ve got to have some sort of structure to how we reopen America.”
“I don’t know how you’re going to do it,” Trump said. “You guys can do what you want. You know, figure out a way to do it, but we cannot stay closed. We’ve got to reopen.”
The president was emphatic about it, sounding almost as though he were pleading with his public health advisers.
“You know, we’ve got to do it,” Trump said. “We’ve really got to do it, Deb. We’ve got to do it, Tony. We just got to do it.”
Fauci, Birx and Redfield worked on a plan. Governors could allow schools, businesses and other public spaces to reopen in a three-phase process once their states showed a 14-day downward trajectory in coronavirus cases.
When the health experts finally brought their plan to Trump in the Oval Office, Fauci warned against the possibility governors might rush to reopen too quickly.
“We really got to be careful,” Fauci said. “We can’t be leapfrogging over one to get to the other. Because if we do there’s going to be a danger of a rebound. And the one thing you don’t want, Mr. President, is to try to open and then rebound and have to close again. Because that’s going to be very embarrassing.”
“I hear you,” Trump said, “but I don’t think that’s going to happen. I think we’ll be fine.”
At one point, Trump asked what the transition plan should be called. Reopening America Again? Opening America Again?
“What sounds better?” Trump asked.
Everyone seemed to know that it was a marketing slogan and Trump would decide on it himself.
On April 16, Trump announced the plan developed by his medical advisers to reopen in a phased process.
“Our nation is engaged in a historic battle against the invisible enemy,” Trump said. “To win this fight, we have undertaken the greatest national mobilization since World War Two.…
“Based on the latest data, our team of experts now agrees that we can begin the next front in our war, which we’re calling ‘Opening America Up Again.’ ”
The president’s announcement was overshadowed in the next day’s newspapers by grim economic news brought about by the shutdown. “U.S. Unemployment Claims Rise to 22 Million,” a banner headline on the front page of The Washington Post read the next day. “Broad Shutdown Pushes Americans to Economic Edge” was the top headline in The New York Times.
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Governors rushed to restart their states’ economies following the release of the administration’s plan, even though many did not meet the criteria for reopening.
Georgia governor Brian Kemp had on April 20 said he would allow “gyms, hair salons, bowling alleys and tattoo parlors” to open in four days.
Trump opposed the move in public. “I told the governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, that I disagree strongly with his decision to open certain facilities which are in violation of the phase one guidelines for the incredible people of Georgia,” he said at the April 22 task force briefing.
But the next day, Trump changed course and began praising governors who were reopening their states.
“You see states are starting to open up now,” Trump said on April 23, “and it’s very exciting to see. I think it’s very awe-inspiring. We’re coming out of it, and we’re coming out of it well.”
By the end of April, 30 states had reopened or announced plans to reopen within the next week—even though most were showing more new cases or a higher percentage of positive tests than two weeks earlier, and therefore did not meet White House criteria for reopening.
The virus claimed the lives of more than 50,000 Americans in April alone, bringing deaths to 63,000 total. Still, the president sounded optimistic and upbeat in public.
“It’s gonna go,” Trump said at a meeting with industry executives on April 29. “It’s gonna leave. It’s gonna be gone. It’s gonna be eradicated.”
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Relations between the United States and North Korea appeared to worsen over time. Efforts to continue negotiations among diplomats for the two countries in Stockholm in early October 2019 had resulted in failure. “If the United States is not well prepared, we don’t know what terrible events will happen,” North Korea’s lead negotiator Kim Myong Gil said afterward. North Korea had threatened the U.S. with a “Christmas gift” in late 2019.
In March 2020, Trump had sent a letter about the coronavirus to Kim Jong Un.
Trump, speaking in an April 18 press briefing, said that Kim had replied back. “I received a nice note from him recently. It was a nice note,” Trump said. “I think we’re doing fine.”
North Korea’s Foreign Ministry, however, denied Kim had sent any such note.
In April and May 2020, Kim mysteriously disappeared for a 20-day period, prompting widespread speculation about his health and whereabouts. At an April 30 news conference, Trump declined to discuss the situation.
“Well, I understand what’s going on and I just can’t talk about Kim Jong Un right now,” Trump said. “I just hope everything is going to be fine. But I do—I do understand the situation very well.”
When Kim reemerged in late May, so too did North Korea’s plans to continue developing both nuclear and conventional weapons.
State media reported that Kim had presided over a meeting in which the nation’s military had set forth “new policies for further increasing the nuclear war deterrence of the country.”
The state media report—accompanied by a photo of Kim sitting at a dais—added North Korea had also undertaken measures “for considerably increasing the firepower strike ability of the artillery pieces of the Korean People’s Army.”
Later, North Korea demolished a liaison office it shared with South Korea—a de facto embassy—and threatened to send troops into the Demilitarized Zone. The office had been closed because of the coronavirus but its destruction seemed an ominous, provocative act.
Several times, Trump underscored for me what he said he believed was his real achievement with Kim: “No war, there was no war. No war!”
Pompeo thought the U.S. was in a reasonably good position with North Korea, though there was no certainty. Pompeo noted that given all the talks and letters and back and forth, Kim never once, directly or indirectly, raised the issue of the 30,000 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea. Kim wanted them there, Pompeo concluded, because they were a restraint on China. That was, yet again, another reason to keep the troops there.
FORTY
“I’ve got the whole Joint Chiefs of Staff waiting for me downstairs,” Trump told me when I reached him by phone around 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, May 6. “Or at least part of them. So I’m going to have to go.”
Trump spoke with me for another fifteen minutes.
I reminded him of something he’d often said to others about the touch needed on the putting green in golf: each putt differed with the weather, the conditions, the way you felt standing on the green. No two putts were the same. You always had to adjust for the shot you were going to make.
“It applies to life,” Trump said. “It applies to life, and certainly to what’s going on now.”
“And so you have to make the calculation how to measure all the conditions” now on the virus, I said.
“That’s right. You’ve got to figure it all out,” he said, “otherwise it doesn’t work out so well.”
“How do you feel about that now?” I asked.
“I feel that we’re doing well,” Trump said. “We have six months to go.” He was talking about his upcoming election, not the state of the country. Some 70,000 people had died from the coronavirus in the United States by then. “I was sailing, sailing,” he said. “I was presiding over the greatest economy in the world.”
I told him people I talked to were saying the presidential race between him and Biden was now a coin toss.
“You know, maybe,” he said. “And maybe not.”
That sounded like a good description of a coin toss.
Trump said he needed to be an optimist. “I have to be the cheerleader too. You can’t have a deadhead.” He added, “Plus we have tremendous stimulus. And there’s a pent-up demand that’s incredible.” He road-tested that new optimism, saying the economy would transition and by “the fourth quarter, we’re going to start to see some decent numbers, and next year we’re going to have among the best numbers we’ve ever had, you watch.”
He said he thought he would do well in the election “if I can knock out the plague substantially, so that we handle it pretty routinely—and that will happen. And if we can start going up with the economy, I think Trump’s going to be very hard to beat.”
I asked the president who had been the first person in January or February to alert him to the danger posed by the coronavirus.
“Well, you start seeing it, Bob. You don’t have to—you start seeing it.”
“When did you see it first?” I asked.
“Well, I’d say toward the end of January, if you think about it.” He reminded me of his decision, announced January 31, to restrict travel from China to the United States.
I asked Trump about the state of his relationship with Dr. Anthony Fauci.
“He’s a Democrat,” Trump said, “but we have a good” relationship. Fauci, who has held his job since the Reagan administration, is not affiliated with any political party, according to Washington, D.C., voting records. “If there was a problem, he’d know about it. So would you.”
I told Trump that my reporting showed his national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, had told him in a PDB session on January 28, “Mr. President, this is going to be the biggest national security threat to your presidency.” I asked Trump if he remembered that, which in itself had to be a jolt.
“No, I don’t,” he said. “No, I don’t. I’m sure if he said it—you know, I’m sure he said it. Nice guy.”
Trump said when he instituted the restrictions on travel from China, “I did that more from what I was seeing on television and reading in the newspapers. I was reading about China.”
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Two days later, May 8, at a public meeting with Republican members of Congress, Trump disparaged tests and vaccines in a rambling discourse.
He noted that Katie Miller, press spokesperson for Vice President Pence, had just tested positive “out of the blue. That is why the whole concept of tests aren’t necessarily great.… She was tested very recently and tested negative. And then today, I guess, for some reason, she tested positive.”
The coronavirus is highly contagious and spreads easily, including among people who are infected but have no symptoms, which is why health professionals say testing has to be continuous.
Trump went on to disparage vaccines. “Well,” he said, “I feel about vaccines like I feel about tests. This is going to go away without a vaccine.…
“I just rely on what doctors say. They say it’s going to go—that doesn’t mean this year, it doesn’t mean it’s going to be gone, frankly, by the fall or after the fall. But eventually, it’s going to go away. The question is will we need a vaccine? At some point, it will probably go away by itself. If we had a vaccine, that would be very helpful. I’d be very happy to have a vaccine.”
Redfield, for one, had told associates a vaccine was essential, and it would be a two- to three-year race to get one.
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As Friday came to a close several hours later and the Sabbath drew near, Jared Kushner, apparently unaware of Trump’s words, gave the fullest endorsement of testing and vaccines in private.
“I actually feel like we’re turning a good corner,” Kushner told an associate. “I’m feeling like we’re managing through the hardest parts and we’re heading in a good direction.” He hoped to have 80 million tests per month available by September, but the path to get there was uncertain. To that date, May 8, only 8.4 million tests had been conducted in the U.S. since the start of the virus. “We’re still figuring it out. But we’re figuring out in real time.”
Even as Trump vacillated on whether a vaccine was needed to beat the coronavirus, Kushner hoped to put together “an obsessive, focused effort” on vaccine development and was zeroing in on someone to lead it. He wanted to develop a structure for running a vaccine and therapeutics workstream for Trump to sign off on within the week.
The administration’s policy and messaging were not settled.
“I’ve been living in the bunker,” Kushner said. “In some ways, getting these things done with these multiagency, high-scrutiny, high-stress environments is like the game of Frogger,” an arcade game. “You keep running through the highway, and occasionally you get hit by a couple of trucks. But you get back up, and you’ve just got to keep dodging through and trying to get going.”
Two weeks earlier, Trump had called Kushner on a Saturday.
“Jared, I need you to get really focused on testing again, because they’re killing me on testing,” Trump had said. “Get your team of geniuses on it.”
Kushner believed that when it came to the Trump presidency, “there’s the above the waves that everyone sees, and then there’s the below the waves.” He operated below the waves.
He told Trump they were already working on the supply chain. “The way you solve testing is you have to make an agreement with the governors. You make the agreement with Cuomo, because he’s kind of the lead on this stuff right now. Let me call Andrew, try to make a deal.”
When they spoke, Cuomo told Kushner, “Look Jared, this is unprecedented territory. We have to get to a place where we can both be saying that has never been done before at this scale. We’re both doing the best we can. And we believe we have enough to open up. And the question now is, what is enough to open up?”
Cuomo had to figure out where all his public health labs were and their testing capacity. They would also need a surge of personal protection equipment for administering tests.
Kushner and his supply chain team met with Cuomo for an hour and a half at the White House on April 21 and asked what his testing goal was.
You have to understand, Cuomo said, governors have never done testing before. Nobody knows what enough is yet because we haven’t designed what reopening the country looks like. Cuomo was at 20,000 tests per day and said if he could get to 45,000, he would be happy.
“Good,” Kushner said. “You have our guarantee that we’ll get you to 45,000 a day.”
Kushner and his team repeated this with the other 49 governors, asking how many tests they wanted to get done in May and June. They worked with the governors to identify laboratory capacity in their states and promised to get them the needed supplies. When governors complained in the press about a lack of federal effort, Kushner felt it meant they weren’t using all of the laboratory resources in their states.
“We probably won’t know till July if everything we’ve done worked,” he said, or how much of the economy they had held together.
“We’ve exploded the testing ecosystem,” Kushner said. “I think you have to grade this on the level of the complexity of the problem. If there was a magic wand you could wave and then have tests for everybody, that’d be a great thing. But that’s just not how the world works.”
The situation reminded Kushner of bringing exams home from school as a child to his father. He’d said he didn’t care what grade Jared got, and only asked one question: Did you do the best you can? On testing, Kushner felt he had. “We’ve left nothing on the field on this, in the sense that I’ve spent every hour of my life, I’ve used every contact I have. I’ve used every idea I’ve had. I’ve tried things. I’ve pushed people. I made some people happy, I made some people mad. But I’ve done everything in my power and everything I’m capable of to get these numbers as high as possible.”
But as the sun set over Washington that evening, Kushner’s best was not enough. His attempt to work below the waves overlooked that many waves were caused by Trump himself.
Kushner’s efforts were those of one pers
on in an ambiguously defined role, attempting to remake parts of the government bureaucracy in the image of a streamlined corporation. This would likely be impossible without clear presidential leadership under the best of circumstances.
The Labor Department released a report on the morning of May 8 showing that 20.5 million jobs had been lost in April. The unemployment rate had soared to 14.7 percent. The death toll from the coronavirus was higher than the number of Americans killed in Vietnam. Kushner observed to Trump that the country had experienced more deaths than Vietnam and more job losses than the Great Depression, and his approval numbers had actually held very steady.
This was largely true. Trump’s job approval had only fallen two points, from 47 percent to 45 percent, between late March and early May.
Kushner and White House aides Hope Hicks and Dan Scavino had recently met for dinner. “We were just kind of sitting around saying, you know, it’s amazing that we survived through all this,” Kushner recalled. Trump’s presidency had had so many different chapters: tax cuts, trade deals, deregulation, Mueller, impeachment, pandemic. They’d gone through four chiefs of staff and four national security advisers. “It’s been an extraordinary presidency.”
Kushner tried to take the long view. “I feel it’s not about where you start, it’s not about where you are in the middle, it’s where you are at the end. And I feel like when I’m done with my time in Washington—like, this isn’t my career. It’s just a tour of duty to do a service for the country.” Kushner said he would look back on the Mexico trade deal, moving the American embassy to Jerusalem and criminal justice reform. “I got ventilators for people who needed ventilators. I helped the president when he needed help. Made a lot of great friendships. And I was able to be a constructive person who helped move the country forward.”
Kushner knew the virus might come to define Trump’s presidency. “When you’re with Trump, you just never know,” he said. “That would be the smart-money bet, and I think this is a once-in-a-hundred-year challenge. But I really do believe that he’s passed the competency test on the execution.”