I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year

by Carol Leonnig

  “This pathogen is transmissible human-to-human, it’s clear it’s now starting to leak out of China, and we need to shut down air travel from China,” Redfield said. “It’s obviously spreading quickly.”

  Trump had questions. What did they know about the virus so far? How many cases did they trace to China? How quickly was it spreading?

  Speaking in neutral scientific terms, Redfield warned that the same ghoulish scenes playing out in China soon could replay in American cities. The NSC had some intelligence that also indicated bodies were literally piling up in hospitals and morgues in Wuhan. Reports flagged that the Chinese government was in the process of building or repurposing buildings to create five new hospitals. Later intelligence would confirm reports that state crematoriums in the region were working round the clock in late January, at a rate of six times the incineration they had done before the virus.

  “The evidence we have right now is that the virus in Wuhan is having significant mortality,” Redfield told Trump. At the time, they estimated eight out of every one hundred people infected in Wuhan would end up dead in a few weeks. Even those who recovered needed long stays in the hospital, filling intensive care wards. “It is totally overwhelming their health system, bringing their health system to its knees,” he said.

  O’Brien and Pottinger chimed in that Wuhan had just effectively quarantined eleven million people, shutting down travel in and out of the entire Hubei province surrounding the city. The top national security aides told the president a reaction this substantial reasonably cleared the path for terminating travel from China.

  As many as fourteen thousand people a day were traveling from China to the United States. “The problem is, Mr. President, they’re still flying the planes out of Wuhan, and we need to shut those planes down, so they at least don’t land in America,” Redfield said.

  Trump would later say he alone pushed for the China ban and claimed that in so doing he had protected “millions” of Americans from death. But in the decision meeting, almost all of the president’s advisers were on board with restricting travel, including Mulvaney.

  Tomas Philipson, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, was a rare voice of opposition, warning the ban on travel from a major economic partner would take a huge financial toll and calling it an “overreaction.” And Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin raised similar concerns, arguing that restricting travel would violate free-market principles.

  Conway, a pollster by trade who was a specialist in political messaging and had worked on the administration’s response to the opioid epidemic, did not oppose the restrictions but offered a note of caution about how it might reverberate with Trump’s core supporters.

  “I wanted you to be tougher on China from the get-go,” she told the president. “So how are we going to tell moms all over the country that we never stood up to China when they were pouring fentanyl into our communities, our kids’ veins, and our coworkers, but we’re doing it now?”

  The president was listening intently, and in a departure from the norm, sticking to the subject at hand. He made a decision in just twenty minutes. Flights would be suspended from China to the United States. Pence, who was just getting up to speed on the issue, supported Trump’s decision.

  Yet Trump wasn’t excited to announce the order himself. He didn’t explain why, but some advisers in the room believed that the president making this statement could make a big splash and he didn’t want to spook the stock markets.

  “Alex, you go out and you announce it,” Trump said to Azar.

  As Azar later told aides, he was immediately suspicious. Trump was not normally shy about grabbing a chance at the lectern. He suspected the president wanted to see how this would be received politically and in the markets. “If this doesn’t play well,” Azar later told an aide, “he will hang me out to dry.”

  Azar went to the Roosevelt Room to prepare an announcement. His staff hustled to draft his remarks. “Total scramble,” one aide recalled. “Par for the course in the Trump administration.”

  It seemed odd to Azar’s team of aides that no one from the White House press shop weighed in on his speech. When Azar signed the formal declaration of a public health emergency before his news conference, his chief of staff, Brian Harrison, took a picture with his personal cell phone.

  Azar stepped under the bright lights of the White House press briefing room before a hastily assembled press corps to announce that travel from China would be banned effective 5:00 p.m. on February 2. He said American residents returning from China would have to be screened prior to entry and quarantine in their homes for two weeks after returning. And he declared that the coronavirus constituted a public health emergency in the United States.

  Before the markets closed for the day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell a whopping six hundred points, an overall market loss of 2 percent. The markets would bounce up and down over the next few days in reaction to the travel restrictions. This was only a preview of what was still to come.

  Redfield and Fauci had been alarmed in recent days about a few reports of asymptomatic transmission in Germany and elsewhere. But because the CDC still hadn’t received a virus specimen from the Chinese nor been permitted to send a team there to investigate, they were somewhat in the dark in late January, thinking this virus was similar to SARS, which was—in the main—easy to spot based on obvious symptoms.

  Three

  Seeking Revenge

  The first week of February 2020 was one of triumph for President Trump. On February 2, he boasted in an interview, which aired during the Super Bowl, that the coronavirus was nothing to worry about thanks to his new travel restrictions. “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China.” Trump’s reelection campaign also spent $10 million to buy sixty seconds’ worth of advertising during the 49ers-Chiefs game—a political muscle flex intended to signal the president’s financial dominance, but that many veteran operatives considered a colossal waste of money surely designed to satisfy the president’s supersized ego rather than win a campaign.

  Two days later, Trump strode into the House Chamber to deliver his annual State of the Union address, a speech complete with dramatic reveals and live spectacles befitting a former reality television producer president. He interrupted his address to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, to an emotional Rush Limbaugh, the controversial and highly partisan conservative radio host.

  But the week’s exclamation point came the day after, February 5, when the Senate voted not to convict Trump in his impeachment trial. As had been broadly expected, Democrats fell short of the two-thirds majority required to remove Trump from office, as the Republican-controlled chamber voted 52–48 to clear Trump of the abuse-of-power allegation and 53–47 to acquit him of obstructing justice related to his attempts to pressure Ukraine. Senator Mitt Romney of Utah was the lone Republican who voted to convict the president on the first article, but Romney also acquitted him on the second.

  Trump celebrated his “VICTORY on the Impeachment Hoax,” as he put it on Twitter. The morning after the Senate vote, Trump sat in his private dining room off the Oval Office with copies of that day’s New York Times, Washington Post, and other newspapers. They all had banner headlines with some variation of “Trump’s acquitted.” The president was giddy with delight.

  “Look at all these headlines,” he told aides. “I’ve never had press coverage like this. This is amazing! I should be impeached more often.”

  The excitement did not come without a cost. Not only had the three-week impeachment trial distracted the president and his top aides from focusing on the coronavirus threat, but it also sowed dissent inside the West Wing. White House counsel Pat Cipollone and Mick Mulvaney had been waging war internally and were barely on speaking terms, owing in part to Cipollone’s shock and frustration at Mulvaney’s public admission in October 2019 of a presidential quid pr
o quo. The extreme distrust between Trump loyalists and the career professionals who they derisively referred to as members of the “deep state”—a group that included Army Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman and other officials who had testified about Trump’s conduct with Ukraine in the impeachment inquiry—was also incapacitating the administration.

  Olivia Troye was also considered part of that group of career officials. She had been a career intelligence officer at the Department of Homeland Security when she was asked early in the Trump administration to transfer to the White House and work for Vice President Pence. When Keith Kellogg interviewed her for the job, he asked, “Why do you want to work here?” Troye responded, “Because I want to serve my country and I want to make a difference.”

  But in early February, as Troye was logging long hours trying to stay on top of an emerging public health calamity, she was being mocked by some colleagues on the vice president’s staff as “deep state.” It didn’t help that her office was next door to that of Jennifer Williams, a Pence foreign policy adviser who had testified before the congressional inquiry and who had a similar public service background.

  After his acquittal, Trump began a retribution campaign to root out the so-called deep state foes and punish his perceived enemies within his government, including anyone he believed contributed to his impeachment or had otherwise crossed him in the Ukraine saga. Escaping accountability had emboldened Trump. The president told aides it was really his enemies who were responsible for him having been impeached. Their crimes were that, when subpoenaed to testify before Congress, they told the truth under oath.

  Within two days, Trump tapped his first victims. Vindman and his brother, Yevgeny Vindman, were removed from their NSC posts and reassigned to the Defense Department. Hours later, news broke that Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, who also had delivered damning testimony to Congress, would be recalled.

  By month’s end, Trump would order Joseph Maguire, the acting director of national intelligence, to vacate his office. Maguire’s crime? His office had privately briefed a bipartisan group of key members of Congress, as the law required, on intelligence—specifically that Russia was interfering in the 2020 election and had developed a preference for Trump. The president would tell Maguire that he had just handed Democrats great ammunition to use against him in the campaign.

  In addition, John Rood, the Defense Department’s undersecretary for policy, who had certified that Ukraine could receive U.S. aid at a time when Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani was trying to block it, would be forced to resign. And by early March, Elaine McCusker, a career public servant who had warned White House officials about the risks of withholding aid from Ukraine, would have her nomination to be Pentagon comptroller withdrawn.

  Trump’s rash and retaliatory dismissal of Maguire would compel retired Admiral William McRaven, who oversaw the Navy SEALs raid that killed Osama bin Laden, to write: “As Americans, we should be frightened—deeply afraid for the future of the nation. When good men and women can’t speak the truth, when facts are inconvenient, when integrity and character no longer matter, when presidential ego and self-preservation are more important than national security—then there is nothing left to stop the triumph of evil.”

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  —

  In early February, around the time of Trump’s acquittal, his job approval rating in the Gallup daily tracking average reached 49 percent, its highest measure in his entire presidency. The data collected privately by Trump’s campaign pollsters were just as strong.

  This marked a significant turnabout. Tony Fabrizio had been deeply concerned about the president’s standing when he began work on Trump’s reelection in the spring of 2019. Fabrizio conducted a round of polls in seventeen states the campaign identified as battlegrounds, such as Florida, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. The data identified a key vulnerability for Trump: Voters perceived the economy to be healthy, booming even, but did not feel it improving their own lives. Roughly six in ten voters thought the economy was moving in the right direction under Trump, but when asked whether they were better off personally, a majority said they felt no difference in their personal financial situation.

  Fabrizio and other Trump advisers believed the president’s reelection would hinge on the economy—and to win he had to close the gap with these voters. This was a psychological challenge as much as a financial one. They advised Trump to stop talking about the economy through the prism of Wall Street and whether stocks were up or down, but instead focus on working people, their wages, and the availability of jobs.

  In early February 2020, Fabrizio went back into the field in those seventeen battleground states and found Trump’s position had completely reversed. Not only were economic perceptions still strong and even a little bit higher than the year prior, but now instead of a majority saying their personal financial situation had not improved, a plurality and in some states a majority said it had. This helped lift Trump’s approval rating in those states—so much so that he was leading his Democratic challengers, outside the margin of error, in states whose electoral college votes totaled 278, and he was likely to win in states totaling an additional 40 electoral college votes. If the economy continued to improve, Fabrizio believed, Trump would easily crest 300 electoral college votes in November, clearing the 270 needed to win.

  Around this time, Brad Parscale met with the president in the Oval Office and made a bold prediction. “Look, we’re going to win on policy,” the campaign manager said. “You’re going to lose on personality, but the economy you’re the winner on, and you’re going to win in a landslide.”

  Trump was beside himself. He had survived impeachment, and now the pros running his campaign were telling him he was headed toward a landslide victory. He got to talking about what he would do in his next four years as president. And Parscale, always striving to score points with the boss, continued to fluff him up.

  “Look how much you’ve gone up,” he said. “You’re winning New Hampshire. You’re winning Nevada. You’re almost winning New Mexico. You’re close in Minnesota.”

  “I don’t understand,” Trump said, confused about how he could be so popular after such an ugly impeachment saga.

  “Americans don’t like a false prosecution,” Parscale told him. Democrats, he argued, “look petty now. And we’re in a good place. Just don’t make a mistake and you’ve got this in the bag.”

  * * *

  —

  After a month of prodding, the Chinese government still refused to open its doors to a U.S. team of virus investigators. Robert Redfield tried to press for access through his Chinese counterpart, George Gao. Alex Azar tried calling his counterpart, Chinese health minister Ma Xiaowei. Both men struck out, politely rebuffed by the Chinese.

  Redfield’s and Azar’s exasperation was shared by Robert O’Brien and Matt Pottinger at the White House, who by the end of January had concluded the best way to possibly break the logjam would be for Trump to personally appeal to Xi Jinping.

  When his advisers first suggested this play at the end of January, Trump was wary. He didn’t want to insult the Chinese president, with whom he had bragged of having a great relationship, and he didn’t want to antagonize the leader of a nuclear power. But by early February, the president agreed to give it his best shot. “Set it up,” Trump told O’Brien and Pottinger.

  After a few days of negotiations between Washington and Beijing, a call between the two presidents was scheduled for February 7. Trump gently broached with Xi the idea of having a team of Americans from the CDC visit Wuhan, and he tried to couch it in a way to allow Xi to save face.

  “I know you’ve got this well in hand. You’ve got good people,” Trump told Xi. “We’ve also got good people. I think we can be helpful. It would also be useful to us to know more about this.”

  Xi listened as Trump continued.

  “They’re ready to go,” Trump
said. “I’ve got the team ready to go. All you have to do is issue the visas and they’ll be there.”

  Xi’s response was cool.

  “We have this in hand,” he told Trump. “We’re waging a people’s war against this virus. It’s going to be fully contained in short order.”

  Then Xi signaled his annoyance with Trump’s recent decision to restrict travel from China to the United States.

  “We urge the United States not to overreact,” Xi said, adding that the coronavirus was “easily defeated” in warmer weather. He even stated an approximate temperature at which the virus started to die off: the high 50s Fahrenheit.

  “We’re going to be in very good shape,” he said.

  Xi never directly answered Trump’s request to allow a CDC team in Wuhan. So Trump circled back to his original ask.

  “We can have people there,” he said. “They’re ready to go.”

  Then Xi gave the most direct “no” without actually saying the word “no.”

  “Well,” the Chinese president said, “we’re working through the WHO.”

  O’Brien hoped they could try again and eventually get Xi’s buy-in. They didn’t know how firmly set China was on stonewalling the Americans.

  * * *

  —

  The weekend of February 8, state governors converged on Washington for their annual National Governors Association meeting. It was a jam-packed few days of policy discussions and political confabs, fancy dinners and receptions—and, importantly, an all-hands briefing on the coronavirus led by Anthony Fauci, Redfield, and other government health leaders, who warned that this virus was far more contagious than SARS and would spread in only a matter of time.