Trump nearly won a second term. More than 74 million people voted to reelect him—the second-highest vote total ever recorded, the highest being Biden’s 81 million. Were it not for Biden’s victories in a handful of swing states, Trump would have won the electoral college and secured four more years in office. It would be foolhardy then to dismiss his presidency as a failure and to turn the page on this period. Rather, we must try to understand what made him appealing to so many, and what that reveals about the country.
Trump almost certainly would have achieved more had he governed effectively and nurtured a professional and productive work culture. Instead, he allowed his White House to become a nest of vipers, with senior officials often advancing their personal agendas and vendettas instead of a collective mission. “It was by far the most toxic environment I could imagine working in, and I’m not a fragile person,” a senior White House official recalled. “People were deeply cruel to each other.”
By his fourth year in office, Trump had surrounded himself as much as he could with enablers and loyal flatterers. Power in the West Wing consolidated around Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, and Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff who prioritized campaign politics and believed it was his duty to execute the president’s wishes.
“Where are the adults?” one Cabinet secretary lamented. “They are supposed to be in the White House advising the president. That’s a big part of the story of this administration. The people he has around him are putting things in his ears, but they aren’t giving him careful, thought-through advice. There are no adults.”
A few sturdy guardrails remained. Milley, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, and Attorney General Bill Barr were there when the president wanted to deploy the military to American cities. Barr, despite loyally looking out for the president’s interests at the Justice Department, also fended off some of his efforts to prosecute and punish his enemies. The leaders of federal health agencies prevented Trump from corrupting the coronavirus vaccine development by rushing approvals before Election Day. And then there was Pence, who certified Biden’s electoral college victory, after four years of unflinching fealty to Trump.
“Even though almost everybody who worked with Trump ended up taking a lot of grief and having reputational risk as a result of it, there were a number of good people who tried to prevent the worst at the White House over the years,” said a senior Republican lawmaker. “Clowns in one camp and people genuinely trying to prevent the worst in the other camp. There were some heroes there.”
“Good people at key moments taught him a lesson that the system is more important than anybody, including the president,” this lawmaker added.
These are conclusions drawn from our four years of reporting about Trump’s presidency and reflect the experiences and opinions of many of the most senior principals who served in the final year of his administration. They divulged, some for the very first time, what they witnessed firsthand, to tell the truth about this extraordinary year for the benefit of history.
As with A Very Stable Genius, the title of this book borrows Trump’s own words. On July 21, 2016, when he accepted the Republican presidential nomination in Cleveland, Trump vowed, “I alone can fix it.” He offered himself to the forgotten men and women of America as their sole hope for redemption, and as a president, he was powered by solipsism. He governed to protect and promote himself. “I alone can fix it” was the tenet by which he led.
What follows is the story of Trump’s final year in office told from the inside. Some events have indelibly marked our nation’s collective memory; many behind-the-scenes episodes have never been reported until now. Some moments show perseverance and resilience; others expose cowardice and callousness. It is an attempt to make sense of a year of crisis, at the heart of which was a leadership vacuum. It is the story of how Trump stress-tested the republic, twisting the country’s institutions for personal gain and then pushing his followers too far. And it is the story of how voters, both fearful for their own futures and their country, finally discharged him.
PART ONE
One
Deadly Distractions
President Trump rang in 2020 at Mar-a-Lago, the landmark mansion in Palm Beach built nearly a century ago by Marjorie Merriweather Post, at his members-only social club’s annual New Year’s Eve gala. Arriving on the red carpet outside the ballroom doors at about 9:30 p.m., as a band could be heard performing Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky,” the tuxedo-clad president stopped to parry questions from a gaggle of reporters, with the first lady at his side. Militiamen earlier that day had attacked the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, and the United States held Iran responsible. Would Trump retaliate?
“This will not be a Benghazi,” he said disdainfully, referring to the attack in 2012 on a U.S. consulate in Libya that had long dogged then secretary of state Hillary Clinton.
Was he prepared for his upcoming Senate impeachment trial?
“It’s a big fat hoax,” Trump said dismissively.
What about Kim Jong Un, the North Korean dictator with whom Trump had boasted of exchanging love letters, who over the holidays menacingly had warned of a “Christmas present” for the United States?
“I hope his Christmas present is a beautiful vase,” Trump quipped, seeming to make light of the possibility of nuclear war, as Melania, silent and statuesque in shimmering gold sequins, broke into a momentary smile.
“We’re going to have a great year, I predict,” he said. “I think it’s going to be a fantastic year.” He added, “Our country is really the talk of the world. Everybody’s talking about it.”
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On that same day, December 31, 2019, a curious email landed in the inboxes of top officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, whose Atlanta headquarters was lightly staffed over the holidays. It was a short alert from a small team of scientists at the CDC’s outpost in Beijing about reports of a series of unexplained pneumonia-like cases in the interior Chinese port city of Wuhan. Few Americans had ever heard of Wuhan, though the city of eleven million on the Yangtze River served as a massive manufacturing and transportation hub, as well as the cultural and urban center for central China. Some dubbed it the Chicago of China. The scientists in the CDC’s office in Beijing wrote that they were working to learn more about what was going on.
For some CDC leaders, the email didn’t set off flashing alarms. Yet Dr. Robert Redfield, the center’s director, was concerned. A highly esteemed virologist and infectious disease physician with decades of research under his belt, Redfield was spending the holidays with his wife, their five grown children, and eleven grandchildren at a rented house in Deep Creek Lake in the mountains of western Maryland, near the Pennsylvania and West Virginia borders. He was disturbed by the words “unexplained pneumonia.” “This seems significant,” Redfield told his chief of staff, Kyle McGowan. “I need to know what they find.”
Redfield had worried about the possibility of a mystery virus like this for months. After joining the Trump administration in March 2018, the CDC director had visited Capitol Hill to meet with key lawmakers who authorized the center’s budget or conducted oversight of its operations. Chatting with him about his twenty years as an army doctor and his work on HIV and AIDS, a few members of Congress had asked Redfield variations on the same question: What disease or public health threat keeps you up at night? Redfield had told them that he dreaded an infectious respiratory disease for which most humans had no immunity, probably some strain of bird flu that could quickly become a pandemic akin to the 1918 influenza, known as the Spanish flu.
Little more than a year later, Redfield was confronted by that very possibility. From that moment on, Redfield’s relaxing family get-together, complete with matching Christmas-plaid pajamas for everyone, was hijacked. The man whose pajama top read “Grandpa” in thick lettering routinely had to leave the living room or the dinin
g table to take work calls. The CDC leader directed his aides to give him and the leadership of the Department of Health and Human Services a “sitrep”—a situation report—the next day. And he asked McGowan to set up a call as soon as possible with his counterpart in China, Dr. George Fu Gao, the director of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
That December 31 email was a critical red flag that the Chinese government was holding its cards close to the vest about a global public health threat. Following the 2003 SARS outbreak, the United States, China, and many other countries had agreed they would all participate in a global software system called ProMED, in which they were obliged to report the appearance of any new or unusual virus and send up a digital flare for all to see. But the CDC was learning of these strange illnesses in Wuhan not because of an official alert, but instead because at midnight on December 30, somewhere in Asia an anonymous doctor had uploaded to the hotline a report about emergency guidance for Wuhan hospitals that had leaked to a news outlet outside of China. The Chinese government had not officially shared the information itself.
On January 1, 2020, the CDC’s immunization and respiratory diseases staff and China team produced the sitrep with all the available intel on the Wuhan illness, as Redfield had requested. The next day, Redfield briefed a senior staffer on the National Security Council, who at the same time was managing the risk of Ebola outbreaks in Africa.
On January 3, Redfield finally connected with Gao by phone. The Chinese virologist offered what seemed like calming news. Gao said the virus had originated in a seafood market in Wuhan that sold exotic game; officials believed the virus had jumped from an infected animal to a human. He said that regional health authorities and the Wuhan government appeared to have it contained and that there were a little more than two dozen cases.
“What about human-to-human transmission?” Redfield asked. The issue of transmission was key, because a contagious virus would be much more difficult to control.
“We don’t have any evidence of that,” Gao said, explaining that the only consistent link among the patients was the market.
Redfield was not entirely convinced about this, because in a few more conversations that day he heard Gao say that at least three of the cases involved patients whose family members were also infected. He found it hard to believe that a man, his wife, and their child had walked through the market and each been independently infected there.
“But, George, you’ve got three clusters,” Redfield said. He told Gao he remained concerned there was human-to-human transmission. Redfield offered to send a team of twenty to thirty infectious disease experts from the CDC to Wuhan to help investigate the virus. Gao agreed that would be helpful and said he would get back to him about this offer.
Redfield hung up, feeling more unsettled. First, he was surprised that Gao seemed to have only recently learned about this virus in Wuhan. He suspected that such a virus would surely have been circulating for some time, so how could the head of the Chinese CDC only know as much as Redfield had learned from reading unofficial media reports? “I think there’s something more here we’re not seeing,” he told an aide.
Redfield wasn’t alone in his suspicions. Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the world’s leading immunologists, had tracked viral infections for nearly four decades as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He knew that the first outbreak of SARS had been traced to a fishmonger in China’s Guangdong Province, but had soon spread human-to-human. The contagion transferred first to nurses and doctors treating the patient who had contracted it, then one of them traveled to Hong Kong and infected people there. Before long, people in twenty-nine countries were sick.
Fauci was apprehensive about the Chinese explanation of the mysterious new virus transferring from animals to humans at a wet market. He also couldn’t believe that everybody who contracted the disease was infected by an animal. A virus is unlikely to jump species so many times at a single wet market. Surely, Fauci thought, there must be human-to-human spread.
Redfield talked to Gao several more times over the next several days, as much as two and three times a day. On one of those calls, Redfield asked Gao to explain the case definition that Wuhan officials were using to analyze the patients with suspicious pneumonia. Gao explained they were focusing on examining people with an unspecified respiratory infection who had contact with the market. Redfield warned Gao that by doing so, they could be missing a much larger problem.
“You’re making a mistake there,” Redfield said. He urged them to look for pneumonia cases that had no link to the market.
Redfield could tell Gao was getting increasingly uncomfortable with his questions. He sounded torn about sharing information. Gao started speaking in a stilted, formal way. This was not the good old George who had casually bantered a year earlier about their plans for visiting each other’s countries. Gao at times now sounded like a prisoner trying secretly to signal in some type of code. Redfield felt sure Chinese “minders” or spies were listening in on their calls, as they typically did, and wondered if that was the cause of Gao’s awkwardness.
The conversation became more uncomfortable when Redfield pressed Gao about his earlier offer to send a CDC team to investigate the virus—a routine move given the expertise of America’s scientists. Gao said he couldn’t extend the invitation and that Redfield should issue a formal request to the Chinese government.
By the time they spoke again a day or two later, Gao sounded distraught. He reported that health officials had looked beyond the market as Redfield suggested and found many, many more cases of the virus with no link to that area or to purchases there. Hundreds of them. He broke down on the phone.
“We may be too late,” Gao said.
On January 6, Redfield wrote a formal request to the Chinese government on U.S. Department of Health and Human Services letterhead, asking for permission to send a CDC team to Wuhan. He never received a reply.
U.S. officials would not fully realize for some time how much Chinese authorities were hiding. A full week before Redfield’s January 3 call with Gao, Chinese health authorities already had significant anecdotal evidence of human-to-human transmission. A Wuhan hospital’s chief of respiratory diseases had reported to her superiors that she had nearly incontrovertible evidence on December 26. While examining two patients with very similar lung damage on their CT scans, she discovered they were wife and husband. Not long after, their son, who came to their apartment to help them while they were sick, also came down with the same symptoms. This was human-to-human transmission. A novel coronavirus. It was just as Redfield and Fauci had suspected. The nightmare the CDC director had been dreading was here.
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Trump, meanwhile, was preoccupied with a threat in the Middle East. In late December 2019, tensions with Iran, which had been simmering since 2018 when the president withdrew the United States from the nuclear agreement that President Barack Obama had previously brokered, had reached a boil. A rocket attack in Iraq by what U.S. authorities identified as an Iranian-backed militia had killed an American contractor. American intelligence agencies had learned that Iran’s top security and intelligence commander, Major General Qassim Soleimani, was orchestrating a broad campaign against American embassies, consulates, and personnel in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon. The intelligence was, in the assessment of General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “compelling,” “imminent,” and “very, very clear in scale [and] scope.”
On December 29, Milley, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien converged on Palm Beach to brief Trump on the intelligence and possible retaliatory measures—including killing Soleimani. As they gathered around a long table in a compact, secure room at Mar-a-Lago, Trump said he wanted to strike back somehow against Iran. He firmly believed that weakness would invite aggression. He went aroun
d the table asking each man what he counseled. Some warned that attacking Soleimani would be risky because Iran could respond by escalating even further. Trump had long said he wanted to avoid a war with Tehran, especially in 2020, when he stood for reelection. The last to weigh in was the president’s top military adviser, Milley, an undaunted, no-bones army four-star, who had seen ample combat after deploying in five U.S. wars and invasions.
“Mr. President, you will be held criminally negligible for the rest of your life if you don’t do this,” Milley said. “American lives are at stake here. We’re going to lose Americans if we don’t take action right away.”
Acknowledging the risks, Milley told Trump, “They’re not going to just take it. They’re going to react.”
Trump was not one for studying intelligence. He had a low tolerance for briefings of any kind, but he struck his advisers as unusually focused, even clinical, that day as they laid top-secret plans for taking out Soleimani.
On December 31, a mob of Shiite militiamen and other Iranian sympathizers stormed the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. Trump brooded over video footage of smoke billowing from the embassy, with pro-Iranian demonstrators protesting outside. He wrote on Twitter that Iran would “pay a very BIG PRICE! This is not a Warning, it is a Threat.”
Trump had discussions over the subsequent days about the forthcoming operation, including receiving intelligence updates tracking Soleimani’s whereabouts. In one such conversation, Keith Kellogg, a retired army lieutenant general who was close to the president and served as Vice President Mike Pence’s national security adviser, summed up the geostrategic imperative for both Trump and Pence.
“This is the guy that needs killing,” Kellogg told them. “He’s been fomenting the problems we’ve had in the Middle East. This guy is the lynchpin.”
I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year Page 2