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

by Carol Leonnig

  “How did you negotiate a salary like that?” Azar asked.

  Redfield, who reported to Azar, said there were a number of fellow “Title 42s” making salaries in the high three hundreds and he assumed Azar had approved it.

  “If I had known that you were going to have to be paid this much, I would have probably asked to look for somebody else,” Azar snapped, his voice loud and his tone sharp.

  “Mr. Secretary, let’s just be real clear here,” Redfield said. “I came in to do this job for the mission, not the money, so if you feel a need to change my salary, change my salary.”

  Azar did just that, slashing Redfield’s pay to $185,000, comfortably below his own. Later during the coronavirus response, when Azar sought to blame Redfield for delays in fixing a flawed CDC test, the CDC director’s mind raced back to the salary fight. “I should have known from the beginning this guy didn’t have my back,” Redfield told Kyle McGowan, his chief of staff.

  Complicating matters internally was the evolving guidance provided by health officials. At first, Fauci and others argued that face coverings were not a necessary precaution, even as mask usage was widespread in Asia.

  “Masks I don’t believe do very much,” Fauci said in an early task-force meeting. “It might make you feel better.”

  In February and March, Fauci and Adams made similar comments publicly, arguing that masks were only needed for health workers. At the time, although masks were proven to protect against contagions in hospitals and other medical settings, there was not yet strong evidence that masks were effective in other environments. In addition, Fauci and Adams were concerned about a run on masks, which were in low supply, and wanted to preserve them for hospital workers and other first responders. By the end of March, however, once the evidence of asymptomatic spread by airborne transmission became overwhelming and studies showed that face coverings were effective in all settings, Fauci, Adams, and other task-force members would change their tune and advocate widespread mask usage.

  Although Trump had previously seemed uninterested in the details of the pandemic, when the virus came to dominate the news cycle in late February and early March, Trump suddenly took a keen interest in the task force and began attending both the public briefings and the closed-door meetings. At one of the latter sessions in the Situation Room, Trump offended some of his aides by interrupting a briefing on the health crisis to identify what he considered a silver lining.

  “I don’t know, maybe this COVID thing is a good thing because I don’t have to shake hands with people,” the germaphobe president said, according to Troye. “I was a businessperson in New York and I shook a lot of hands, but when you’re a politician, you really have to shake a lot more hands. I have to shake hands with these disgusting people. It’s disgusting. And now I don’t have to shake their hands. Maybe it’s a good thing.” Trump said through a spokesman that he always hated shaking people’s hands and denied that he said this in relation to COVID.

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  In the first week of March, the possibility of having to impose further travel restrictions—including on the cruise industry—weighed heavily on task-force members. Cruise ships were turning into floating COVID cities, super-spreaders at sea. The CDC had been struggling for weeks with what to do about the Diamond Princess, a cruise ship quarantined off the coast of Japan, on which hundreds of passengers, some of them U.S. citizens, had tested positive for the virus. But in early March, officials were learning of a cluster of COVID cases coming off another cruise ship, the Grand Princess, which had returned home to port after embarking on its journey from San Francisco in mid-February with thirty-five hundred passengers. To top it off, an elderly passenger on that voyage had suffered extreme respiratory distress upon disembarking. On March 3, she tested positive for COVID-19 and died on March 4.

  Gathered in the Situation Room, several advisers urged Pence to consider a full ban on cruises setting sail on new voyages. Pence, ever mindful of alienating corporate America, said he wasn’t ready. On March 5, the pressure to do something about the floating viral vessel ratcheted up. Redfield, who had the authority to order a ban on cruises, was most emphatic, and Azar agreed. They explained that worldwide three hundred thousand Americans had recently been passengers on these ships and many could have become infected.

  Ken Cuccinelli, a senior official at the Department of Homeland Security, warned they needed a decision—and soon. He told Pence that an estimated hundred thousand more passengers would set sail in two days, as most cruises departed on Saturdays, and stressed that the Coast Guard would need twenty-four hours’ notice to issue a no-sail order.

  As the discussion continued, Pence and Short grew concerned that some of the doctors—who in this and other meetings disparaged cruises as “petri dishes” and made comments like, “I don’t know why anyone would go on a cruise”—harbored a bias against the industry. They worried about the precedent it could set if the government imposed harsher restrictions on cruise liners than on commercial airlines, for instance. Task-force members saw Short pass Pence a note. Then the vice president said, “I think we need to study that some more. I’m not ready for that.”

  Pence told the group he planned instead to meet with the cruise ship CEOs that coming Saturday, March 7, in Fort Lauderdale, a primary port of call in South Florida, in order to see what health precautions the industry was taking to control spread aboard their vacations at sea.

  Trump also was bound for Florida that weekend, but there were some coronavirus hiccups in his travel plans on Thursday and Friday. Trump was scheduled to fly to CDC headquarters in Atlanta for a press event on March 6 to showcase the hard work going on to increase testing capacity. But the evening of March 5, Azar urged Mick Mulvaney to cancel the event because a CDC staffer on the campus appeared to have tested positive for COVID. The acting White House chief of staff agreed.

  The next morning, at a White House event, Trump motioned to Azar.

  “Why the fuck did we cancel the trip to the CDC?” the president demanded.

  “There’s a case we thought was positive,” Azar said, though in the intervening hours they would learn it was a false positive.

  “Screw that,” Trump said. “We’re going.”

  Trump hollered over to an aide: “Make it happen. I’m going.”

  The Secret Service went into overdrive to replan a canceled trip in less than four hours. Once he got to Atlanta for the CDC tour, Trump didn’t mince words in reacting to the troubling news that roughly half of the people tested on the Grand Princess ship being held in the waters off San Francisco—twenty-one out of forty-six passengers—had tested positive for COVID. Trump told reporters he didn’t think the infected people should disembark, although public health officials said it was an unhealthy place to quarantine and would likely result in increased infections.

  “Frankly, if it were up to me, I would be inclined to say leave everybody on the ship for a period of time and you use the ship as your base, but a lot of people would rather do it a different way,” Trump said. “They’d rather quarantine people on the land. Now, when they do that, our numbers are going to go up. Our numbers are going to go up.”

  The answer revealed Trump’s consistent focus on political optics, public health be damned. He wanted the cruise business to keep chugging along—and most of all, he wanted to keep from having to count cruise ship infections in “our numbers.” Wearing a red cap emblazoned with his reelection campaign slogan, “KEEP AMERICA GREAT,” and flanked by Redfield and Azar, Trump claimed to have special scientific expertise.

  “I like this stuff,” he said. “My uncle is a great person who was at [the Massachusetts Institute of Technology]. He taught at MIT for, I think, a record number of years. He was a great, super genius. Dr. John Trump. I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much abou
t this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.”

  This natural ability did not prevent the president from ignoring medical advice. At a time when most Americans were avoiding social interactions out of fear of spreading the virus, Trump spent the weekend at Mar-a-Lago, where he had dinner with the Brazilian president and members of his delegation, three of whom tested positive for the virus. He also attended a thousand-person campaign fundraiser and a large birthday bash for Kimberly Guilfoyle, his son Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend, who was turning fifty-one.

  Absent from the CDC visit was Mulvaney, who typically accompanied the president on his travels. Once Trump got to Mar-a-Lago the evening of March 6, he announced on Twitter that he was appointing a new chief of staff, Mark Meadows, a former Republican congressman from North Carolina and one of Trump’s fiercest defenders on Capitol Hill, who had long been a thorn in the side of the party establishment. Aside from being appointed U.S. special envoy to Northern Ireland as a consolation prize, Mulvaney’s dumping was unceremonious.

  Trump’s selection of Meadows surprised no one. After three years of grinding through the guardrails, the president finally had found the ultimate enabler to be his chief of staff. Meadows had proved his loyalty to Trump during the impeachment proceedings, helping lead the president’s defense strategy and appearing frequently on the Fox News Channel to attack the investigation. He had cultivated a close relationship with the president, Jared Kushner, and other members of the Trump family. He had recently dined with the president at the steakhouse in the Trump International Hotel in Washington and, unlike Mulvaney, sat with him at the head table at the February 16 wedding of Stephen and Katie Miller. Meadows’s transition would be delayed by a couple of weeks because he had been exposed to someone with the coronavirus, so he self-isolated at home before reporting to work at the White House.

  The next day, March 7, Pence, accompanied by Redfield, met with the cruise ship executives, just as a new cycle of cruise ships tossed off their lines at the ferry docks and set sail. The CEOs told the vice president they were working on their plan; Pence announced they would be allowed to keep sailing.

  When the task force met on March 8, Azar told Pence they needed to take bolder steps.

  “We’ve got to ban cruise ships,” Azar said. “We’ve got to stop travel with Europe and get our travel advisories up.”

  Pence nodded, listening attentively, and smiled when Azar finished talking.

  “Yes, we need to be bold here,” Pence said. “But we need to set up a process to think about that.”

  Public health officials were beside themselves at the inaction since Pence had taken the reins. The vice president’s first instincts were to delay decisions. Pottinger commiserated about the paralysis, telling another official, “They can’t seem to get to a decision.” As an outside adviser to the president explained at the time, “Pence is just drifting around. There’s no decision being made at the task-force level. The decisions are all Trump, or they’re not getting made.”

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  Grogan awoke on March 9, anxious about the hugely consequential workweek ahead of him. He had been emailing with Birx and Redfield over the weekend, and they all agreed that this week would be make or break for the virus. “We can’t pussyfoot around,” Grogan said. Big decisions would need to be made about travel restrictions and other measures. Early that Monday morning, he reached out to Ivanka Trump and Kushner. “This is going to be a really momentous week,” he told the couple. “I may need you guys to say something to the president to get him focused.”

  Two days later, on March 11, the issue of further restricting travel came to a head. Pence convened a meeting in the Roosevelt Room. Azar, Redfield, Fauci, Birx, Grogan, and Kellogg were there. So were Steven Mnuchin, Mike Pompeo, Robert O’Brien, and Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf. Chris Liddell, a deputy White House chief of staff, asked Kushner to join them, considering the magnitude of the decision facing the president. They also were joined by Hope Hicks, Trump’s longtime communications adviser who had left the White House in 2018 but returned in early March 2020 as a counselor to the president.

  There was consensus around the table to shut down inbound travel from Europe, although Mnuchin argued against it because such restrictions would constrain the transcontinental flow of goods and people and therefore inhibit commerce. Larry Kudlow, the National Economic Council director, shared that view and was adamant that cargo flights be permitted to continue unimpeded. Mnuchin and Kudlow both said restricting transcontinental travel would be economically catastrophic.

  The group then moved to the Oval Office to present their recommendation to the president. Redfield felt the issue was so urgent that when it came time for him to lay out his recommendation, he stood up, walked toward Trump, and put his hands on the Resolute Desk.

  “Mr. President, we need to shut down all air travel to and from Europe,” the CDC director said.

  “Are you serious?” Trump asked, looking incredulous. He had a lot of questions, but the first was the obvious one. “Why?”

  Redfield explained that the pathogen was spreading through the United States very quickly and they desperately needed to slow down the rate of spread by stopping new cases from flying in.

  “I wish that we had come to you to suggest that two weeks ago,” Redfield said. “Clearly this coronavirus is getting seeded throughout our country from a virus that’s gone from China to Europe, Europe to America, and we need to shut down all air travel.”

  Mnuchin shook his head and firmly objected. Trump asked him some questions. Then he turned to Birx.

  “Do you agree with Redfield?” he asked.

  She said she did.

  “Fauci, do you agree with Redfield?” Trump continued.

  “I do, sir,” Fauci replied. He chimed in to explain that Italy’s numbers of infections—and deaths—were astronomical. Anyone in Italy could travel almost anywhere else in Europe.

  Mnuchin continued to make the case that the economy wouldn’t recover.

  “You can’t do that, Mr. President,” he said. The Treasury secretary warned of an economic meltdown far grimmer than a recession. “We’re not talking about the r-word here. We’re talking about the d-word. This will be a depression; you’ll never get out of it throughout your presidency.”

  But the doctors in the room were predicting a grim death toll if they didn’t block the pathogen at the border.

  “Let me give you the data, Steve,” Birx said. “We’ve got infections right now in thirty-five states. Thirty of those states have infections from European sources. Only five states have infections that originated in China. . . . If we don’t do something, we’re talking about deaths that could be a massive, massive number.”

  Mnuchin continued to push back about a market collapse. O’Brien said, “This is something we have to do. We’re talking about saving thousands of lives. How do you think the markets are going to react when thousands of people die from this?”

  Kushner thought the debate had gotten too emotional and tried to buy time. “Let’s not make [the decision] right now. Let’s give the president a couple hours to think about this and let’s come back to him with a set of clear options,” he said, suggesting they meet among themselves in the meantime and try to dial the temperature down.

  The group moved to the Cabinet Room, where although Pence chaired the task force it became awkwardly clear to those in the room that Kushner was really in charge. He led the meeting, questioned Birx on her virus data, and challenged other speakers.

  At moments, Pence sounded like a supplicant to the president’s son-in-law. “Jared, what do you think?” the vice president asked. “Jared, what would you do?” One attendee said it was “nauseating” to watch Pence defer to Kushner, considering only one of them actually had been elected by the American people. />
  The advisers then returned to the Oval and recommended to Trump that he shut down travel from Europe. They argued it was the right thing to do medically, and that if the virus threat dissipated, they could always reverse the restrictions at a later point. Trump’s mind was made up. He had sided with the doctors.

  “We can always rebuild the economy,” the president said. “We can’t get these lives back. We can make the money back. We’ve got to shut it down.”

  Mnuchin came around to supporting Trump’s decision, but stressed that the government had to take aggressive steps to protect the economy from the anticipated aftershocks.

  Trump was scheduled to meet next with Blackstone Group chairman Stephen Schwarzman and other business leaders.

  “I should speak to those guys about it,” Trump said, hesitating about his decision.

  “Mr. President, if you do that and reverse your decision to shut down travel, just be aware that the story in the press will be that you reversed your decision after talking to a bunch of billionaires,” Grogan said.

  “I can ask them,” Trump said.

  As the president’s advisers dispersed, O’Brien took a shortcut to his office through the West Wing reception area. There, Fauci stopped him and patted him on the arm. “Bob, thank you,” Fauci said. “You saved a lot of lives today.”

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  Trump stuck with the travel restrictions and, at Kushner’s recommendation, made plans to deliver a televised address to the nation that evening from the Oval Office at arguably the most sobering moment of his presidency. “You have to show a real commitment to the fact that you are taking this seriously,” Kushner told Trump.