The president’s next scheduled meeting was with Mike Pompeo. Azar hoped the two of them could convince Trump. The intervention was not to be, however. Trump tweeted: “China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”
* * *
—
On January 28, at around 7:30 a.m., Pottinger was driving himself to work at the White House when his cell phone rang with a callback he had been waiting for. On the other line was a doctor in China whom Pottinger knew well. Pottinger had been reaching out with increasing urgency to a list of old sources and friends in Asia from his time there as a journalist. Now he had one of those trusted contacts on the phone. The doctor told Pottinger the virus was spreading rapidly, already far beyond the province of Hubei. There were hundreds of cases traced to community spread. And there was something worse.
“This is wholly unlike SARS in 2003,” the doctor said. It was spreading asymptomatically, the doctor noted, estimating that as many as half of China’s cases at that point had been spread by people without symptoms.
“This isn’t SARS 2003,” the doctor said. “This is 1918.”
The Spanish flu had infected roughly a third of the world’s population over two years and was estimated to have killed at least fifty million people.
Pottinger thought, Okay, this is scaring the shit out of me.
He then shared this new information with O’Brien, who suggested Pottinger join him at Trump’s regular intelligence briefing later that morning. The two men, CIA briefer Beth Sanner, Mulvaney, and several other senior officials gathered in the Oval sometime around 11:30, with O’Brien and Sanner taking chairs in front of the Resolute Desk and Pottinger sitting on a sofa just behind them.
Sanner began going through a long list of hot topics, then eventually turned to the coronavirus in China. The president interjected.
“What do you think of this thing?” he asked O’Brien.
O’Brien said the NSC saw evidence that the virus was becoming very serious.
“This is going to be the most severe national security threat of your presidency,” O’Brien said.
Sanner then recited the available facts, none of them terribly alarming. New stats on the infection spread in China. The status of the Chinese government’s travel bans in and out of Wuhan.
“Is this going to be worse than the 2003 outbreak of SARS?” Trump asked.
Sanner said it wasn’t clear at this point.
O’Brien suggested Pottinger add a few new things he had learned. The deputy national security adviser, a Marine by training, stood up from his sofa seat.
“Mr. President, I want to convey some things I just learned because I think it’s important,” Pottinger said. “This thing is spreading asymptomatically. This is going to be more akin to the 1918 flu outbreak.”
Noting that he agreed with O’Brien about the seriousness of the threat, Pottinger explained that if people without symptoms were spreading the infection, it would be harder to identify those who were infected. Without symptoms, they wouldn’t be able to isolate and control the contagion, as they had done with SARS.
“You can’t do temperature checks and expect to find this thing, so it’s really going to be much more challenging,” Pottinger said.
And he warned the president that the Chinese government was not being transparent about these worrisome facts.
“Do you think I should shut off travel from China?” Trump asked.
This was a topic that O’Brien and Pottinger had been preliminarily discussing following the Wuhan lockdown. Both advisers told the president he should restrict travel from China.
“I think we should, because it’s clear to me they are not being forthcoming,” Pottinger said, referring to Chinese government officials. “I’m getting much more detailed information from personal phone calls than the entire global health establishment is getting.”
Trump did not commit to a decision, and Sanner moved along to the next topic. In a forty-five-minute discussion of a globe full of problems, they devoted roughly ten minutes to talking about the virus. The meeting ended and the president’s advisers dispersed.
As they were walking out the door, Mulvaney turned to Pottinger with a stern face. At this point a skeptic of the virus morphing into a domestic crisis, Mulvaney was irate that Pottinger had raised reports from a single contact to effectively scare the president into taking action. “That was totally inappropriate,” the acting chief of staff told Pottinger. “You won’t come to another one of these.”
* * *
—
Downstairs in the Situation Room, Mulvaney gathered some members of the fledgling coronavirus task force. The topic turned to the idea of restricting travel from China into the United States, as a bulwark against the virus spreading in America. This would be a severe course of action. Various advisers highlighted the risks in doing so, including choking off commerce between the world’s two largest economies.
Fauci raised other concerns: Historically, travel bans have not worked to contain infectious diseases, and it would not be feasible to restrict travel worldwide.
As Fauci spoke, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro was incredulous. Navarro was a Trump World original, having advised then candidate Trump during the 2016 campaign, and had fashioned himself as the ultimate loyalist, earning a reputation as a sycophant. He was also an ideologue, advocating an isolationist approach to foreign policy and an adversarial posture toward China. Navarro titled his two books on that subject The Coming China Wars and Death by China.
This was the first time Navarro had met Fauci, who had been widely respected through Democratic and Republican administrations alike. Looking across the table at Fauci, however, Navarro thought to himself, That’s the most arrogant, dumb guy I’ve ever met—just full of himself, just absolutely full of himself, like his excrement didn’t stink and he was God. Navarro had found his antagonist—the archrival he would plot to undermine and cut down at every turn. Navarro went home the night of January 28 determined to convince Fauci and other task-force members of the imperative of restricting travel.
Late that night, the first in a series of charter flights to repatriate Americans from China touched down in Anchorage for fuel and an infection check. Its 201 passengers—staffers from the U.S. consulate in Wuhan and other private citizens based there—were among 800 people the State Department was seeking to evacuate as soon as possible. After the passengers were screened twice for possible infection in Alaska, the plane continued to its destination: March Air Reserve Base outside Riverside, California. There, they were supposed to stay in special barracks until health officials could be sure they wouldn’t infect the general public.
The next day, January 29, Navarro submitted a memorandum to the NSC and coronavirus task force advocating for “swift containment and mitigation measures” and noting that the most readily available option was to issue a travel ban to and from the source of the outbreak, China. He presented his case using game theory. Navarro calculated that the cost of stopping travel from China to the United States for one month would be approximately $2.9 billion, and if the virus became like a seasonal flu outbreak or was contained, travel would be able to resume after that. But he calculated that the economic costs of a pandemic without any containment measures would be catastrophically higher, $3.8 trillion.
By the time some task-force members read Navarro’s memo, however, they had already come around to the presumption that Trump would restrict travel from China, considering both how quickly the virus was spreading there and the extraordinary steps the Chinese government itself was taking to try to contain it and to treat the infected. China was officially reporting some 6,000 cases of the virus and 132 deaths, but U.S. officials reasoned the actual toll wa
s considerably higher.
* * *
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At sixty-eight, Redfield had toiled for four decades as an army doctor, virologist, and university lab director before taking the CDC job. He figured he should be retired and relaxing with his wife and grandchildren. Yet here he was, in the fourth iteration of his public health career, and a worldwide health catastrophe was occurring on his watch. Since Redfield’s first call in early January with George Gao, the disturbing events came at him nonstop. He was terribly sleep-deprived. His wife kept waking up in their Baltimore home to find him at 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. in dark rooms talking on the phone with people in faraway time zones, such as CDC scientists in China, WHO officials in Europe, or public health officials in California or Washington State.
The morning of January 30, Redfield felt like everything was starting to explode. Illinois officials had contacted the CDC the previous night to report the husband of the Chicago-area woman in her sixties was now also infected. He became the sixth U.S. case. This was irrefutable evidence that the infection spread from human to human. Then Redfield’s staff alerted him to a seventh U.S. case. The double whammy solidified Redfield’s resolve about something he initially had resisted: restricting travel from China.
Like Navarro, O’Brien and Pottinger had been pushing for the travel ban for several days. They strongly believed that China had been consistently misleading the United States about how badly the virus was spreading, even beyond China’s border. Redfield, like Fauci, was not initially in favor of shutting down borders and announcing travel bans, which they believed could cause panic while doing little to stop diseases from spreading. The public health mantra to stop the spread was to identify the infected, trace their contacts, and isolate the exposed.
Now, though, Redfield felt this virus was galloping past them and decided the ban was critical. Fauci concluded the same. They spoke to Azar during a previously scheduled meeting around 11:00 a.m. that day to let him know they had changed their minds. Azar was quickly on board, too. Azar’s wife, Jennifer, had been asking him about this issue recently. “This is going on in China,” she said. “Why are we letting people come in from China?” Azar thought that was a good question.
Trump had no idea about the anxiety building among his experts. He departed the White House at about 1:15 p.m. to fly west for a pair of campaign rallies later that day in Michigan and Iowa. But his White House operation kept humming along. Mulvaney had a deputies’ meeting on coronavirus at 3:00, in the small Situation Room. A possible China travel ban wasn’t on the agenda, but given the urgency Azar was getting from Redfield and Fauci, he told Mulvaney they needed to make it the central topic. The group discussed the new cases and the evidence of human-to-human transmission. Then they discussed implementation of the “212(f)”—their shorthand for the proposed travel restriction, referring to the section of the statute spelling out the president’s authority to ban entry to the country in times of danger or crisis. They also agreed to endorse the State Department’s plan to fly four more evacuation flights of Americans out of Wuhan and surrounding areas. Nearly everyone agreed both the ban and the repatriation flights were no-brainers. Mulvaney told the team they would gather to present the recommendation to the president the next day.
As the meeting wrapped, Mulvaney asked Azar to walk with him to his office upstairs so they could call the president, who was aboard Air Force One, to get his buy-in on evacuating the additional Americans. Mulvaney stood near his standing desk by the fireplace in his office, with Azar hovering, and got Trump on the line. Mulvaney’s national security aide, Rob Blair, and legal adviser, Mike Williams, sat on nearby couches, while Deputy Secretary of State Steve Biegun was connected by the White House operator.
“Mr. President, we’ve got something that Biegun and Azar need to run by you,” Mulvaney said.
Biegun opened with what he and the group thought would be a basic overview of the effort to bring home diplomats and permanent residents, as well as protections to ensure the evacuated Americans didn’t spread the virus after returning. The president wanted to know how many people. Biegun estimated it would be several hundred right away, and eventually could be a couple of thousand.
Trump exploded.
“We’re not letting them come back,” he said. “You risk increasing my numbers. You won’t increase my numbers.”
Trump didn’t want sick Americans landing on U.S. soil, even if they were working for the State Department, or else the government would have to report a rise in infections, and that would make the public—the voters—nervous. The president was always thinking about the political ramifications for himself, even during a crisis.
Biegun and Azar explained the measures under way to screen and isolate the passengers who had already landed in California.
“The first flight was a mistake,” Trump said. “Those people shouldn’t have been in China in the first place.”
Azar and Mulvaney exchanged a look. The president was talking about Americans who had gone to China to serve the U.S. government as if they had irresponsibly or illegally crossed into a foreign country. Biegun compared their situation in Wuhan to a war zone. United States government employees deserved protection and services that could not reliably be provided to them in a city where the virus had overrun hospital wards and created a true emergency.
“It would be like leaving a man on the field of battle,” Biegun added.
Azar urged the president to consider his mantra of placing America—and thus Americans—first.
“This would be contrary to your brand of protecting Americans, Mr. President,” he said.
O’Brien walked into Mulvaney’s office midconversation. Trump said he thought doing so amounted to a dangerous risk. But Biegun and Azar stuck to their guns. They appealed to Trump’s media instincts, telling him it would look horrible not to bring Americans home when there was a relatively safe way to do so. Trump gradually eased back, and by the end of the call he described himself as supporting the flights. The president said there was no other choice. Then he hung up. In the coming weeks, Trump would fully embrace the repatriation of Americans after hearing the first-person accounts of some of the early evacuees.
“All right,” Mulvaney said, turning to the group. “The president approved the flights.”
Azar warned Mulvaney he wasn’t sure the president was entirely on board. After his painful e-cigarette experience with Trump, Azar wondered who the president would blame for this later down the road.
“Mick, the president is not at rest on the issue,” he said.
Azar took the opportunity of this smaller meeting with the acting chief of staff to complain, as he regularly had, about a string of damaging leaks about him in media reports, and pointed to Grogan as the culprit.
“This has got to stop,” Azar said. “I’m literally here working nonstop with the White House. He’s your guy, and he’s leaking every day and making crap up.”
“You don’t know who did it,” Mulvaney said. “Everyone leaks here.”
He added, “You just have to put up with it.”
* * *
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That same day, the WHO, which had been deferential to China and slow to hit the panic button, finally declared the coronavirus a global health emergency. But at an event that day in Warren, Michigan, Trump told a roaring rally crowd that they had nothing to worry about.
“We think we have it very well under control,” he said. “We have very little problem in this country at this moment—five—and those people are all recuperating successfully.”
Joining Trump at the rally was the vice president, who had been notably disengaged from the coronavirus response to date. Pence had been represented in task-force meetings by Olivia Troye, a career national security professional who was serving as his homeland security adviser. But Troye sometimes had difficulty getting through to Pence and his chief of staff, Mar
c Short, with virus updates.
Such was the case the night of January 30. Aware that a presidential decision was imminent about restricting travel from China, Troye called Short several times to try to brief him and the vice president on the matter, but he didn’t pick up. He and Pence were preoccupied with the rally and preparing remarks for an anti-human-trafficking event scheduled the next day. Troye sent a memo to Air Force Two outlining the travel decision but received no acknowledgment that Pence or Short had read it.
* * *
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The next day, January 31, Mulvaney summoned everyone to the Oval Office. The doctors. The economists. The national security chiefs. The vice president. Though Trump was leaning toward it, Mulvaney wanted him to hear from all his advisers before officially deciding about travel from China.
When the Oval session was hastily added to Pence’s calendar, Short called Troye and asked her to rush to the vice president’s office right away to brief him on this. She was irritated because she had been trying to get their attention the day before, and now suddenly everyone was scrambling. But she was ready. She was given five minutes to lay out the facts for the vice president and Short, as well as Kellogg, who was in the room.
Pence and Short asked her what she expected in the Oval when the travel ban came up.
“I think you should expect to implement this,” Troye said.
Short rolled his eyes and scoffed at her. “Can you believe this?” he said, looking at Pence.
“There’s no way,” Pence said.
As they hurried toward the Oval, Kellogg said to Troye, “You’re doing your job, and you’re doing it well. You’re nailing it, kid.”
Once the meeting began, Redfield did a lot of the talking. He told the president that he would be failing in his job as CDC director to protect the American public’s health if they didn’t block flights coming from China.
I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year Page 5