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

by Carol Leonnig

  The speech was hastily prepared, written quickly by Kushner, Stephen Miller, and staff secretary Derek Lyons, with considerable input from Pence. The script was ready to be spoon-fed to the president via the teleprompter in front of him as he sat behind the Resolute Desk.

  Some of Trump’s top advisers stood in a semicircle behind the cameras, facing the president. Trump looked up at Azar, the health secretary he barely tolerated, and teased him.

  “Do you wanna do this instead of me?” Trump asked, partly joking.

  Azar laughed and said: “Nope. All yours.”

  But just as they were readying to go live, the president looked down and cursed. One of the black-inked Sharpies he liked to use had bled onto his shirt, its cap having wriggled off.

  “Oh, fuck,” Trump said. “Uh-oh, I got a pen mark. Anybody, anybody have any white stuff?”

  The president of the United States had suffered a wardrobe malfunction. Hicks dashed up to his desk and gently tugged at his jacket and tie to make sure it covered the black spot. In a matter of moments, she had fixed the problem.

  The president began. The speech was going reasonably well, his aides felt. But then Trump veered off script and mistakenly said the U.S. government was shutting off all transportation from Europe, which left the impression no ships could bring cargo to American ports. In addition, he neglected to specify that U.S. citizens would be exempt and allowed to return home.

  Trump’s aides, who knew the travel ban did not include cargo restrictions, cringed. Oh, shit, why didn’t he just read the script? Azar thought.

  Still, when Trump finished, the small cluster of aides around Trump told him a version of the same thing: “Home run, boss.”

  Trump was beaming, thinking he had sounded decisive and strong. But he acknowledged to aides right away that he had made a mistake in describing the travel ban. Kushner sought to reassure him by saying the White House would correct his misstatement, and Trump sent a cleanup tweet of his own. “The restriction stops people not goods,” he wrote.

  The ten-minute speech drew sharp criticism—not only because it was riddled with errors, but also because of its nationalist and xenophobic tone and the president’s lack of empathy and boasts instead about his own decisions. Trump seemed ill at ease. His delivery was labored and monotone, as he twiddled his thumbs, struggling at times to read the words on the teleprompter. Aides speculated that his heart simply wasn’t in it. As one of them recalled, “He didn’t say he didn’t want to do it, but he wasn’t gung-ho about it, and when he’s not one hundred percent in it, it’s not a good result typically.”

  The speech was intended to reassure the nation that he had the coronavirus crisis under control. It had the opposite effect, raising more questions than providing answers. Futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell in real time with virtually each word Trump uttered, a preview of the bloodbath in the stock markets to come the next morning. Absorbing the criticism made Trump apoplectic.

  The lack of clear instructions in Trump’s announcement set off chaos in airports on both sides of the Atlantic. Americans about to leave on flights bound for Europe ditched their plans out of fear they wouldn’t be able to get back, while Americans abroad panicked and scrambled to return home.

  The administration had done little to actually implement the ban and to make sure it was done safely. Who would enforce the restrictions? Who would decide the method for screening travelers’ health? Who would ensure knowledgeable teams were available at airports to receive what would no doubt be thousands of Americans seeking to return home?

  At the same time, the ground was shifting in communities across the country, just as Nancy Messonnier had predicted two weeks earlier. All manner of businesses—from law firms and Fortune 500 companies to manufacturing plants and hotels—began telling their nonessential workers to stay home until further notice. State and municipal officials started announcing bans on large gatherings and forcing the closure of schools, restaurants, gyms, and other businesses where people congregate. Doctors complained they could not conduct tests on patients they suspected were infected because of very narrow CDC testing guidelines. Local leaders complained about the terribly small supply of tests, not to mention the long delays to receive results. An enormous coronavirus data-track operation managed by Johns Hopkins University produced daily counts on U.S. testing and new cases of infections, which showed the United States lagging terribly behind other countries.

  The virus was spreading silently through communities.

  * * *

  —

  On March 12, Fauci and Redfield testified at a House Oversight Committee hearing about the testing problem that was sparking considerable outrage. They acknowledged that a CDC coronavirus test that was supposed to be a model for public health labs to copy had been delivering inconclusive results—a glitch they were working to fix. But the bigger problem was that the public health system hadn’t invested in producing a massive supply of tests for new pathogens at a rapid rate. It relied largely on the private sector, which only rushed to make tests on its own timetable and based on its own bottom line.

  So far, Fauci and Redfield told the lawmakers, only about eleven thousand Americans had been tested for coronavirus in the first seven weeks of the outbreak. That was less than the roughly twenty thousand tests South Korea was then conducting daily.

  “That is a failing,” Fauci said. “Let’s admit it.”

  “Failing” was not a word Trump was going to let stand. The next day, at a White House news conference, the president tried to correct the media’s conclusion—based on hard data and bolstered by Fauci’s admission—that the U.S testing program was a failure and being rapidly outrun by the virus. When asked by NBC’s Kristen Welker if he took any responsibility for the slow rate of testing, Trump replied, “No, I don’t take responsibility at all.”

  Trump was derided on talk shows and on editorial board pages for his denial of responsibility. It was eating him up. And then over the weekend, scenes of chaos overtook the nation’s busiest airports. Terminals were packed with hundreds of anxious international passengers, who were queried as part of “enhanced entry screenings.” Delayed and rerouted flights to and from Europe only added to the dysfunction. And there was no coherent messaging from Washington.

  Photos of mayhem at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport taken by frustrated travelers went viral on social media. Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker, a Democrat, went ballistic as he saw the images and heard reports from O’Hare. He tried calling the White House but couldn’t get through to anyone with answers. Late at night on March 14, he tweeted directly at Trump and Pence: “The crowds & lines O’Hare are unacceptable & need to be addressed immediately. @realDonaldTrump @VP since this is the only communication medium you pay attention to—you need to do something NOW.” Pritzker added in a follow-up tweet, “The federal government needs to get its s@#t together. NOW.”

  Later that evening, Pritzker got an apology from an official at U.S. Customs and Border Protection. And he got a call from a midlevel White House aide, Doug Hoelscher, the director of intergovernmental affairs, who berated the governor. Hoelscher told Pritzker it was “irresponsible and juvenile” to “tweet angry tweets” and to criticize the president.

  “Are you kidding me?” the flabbergasted governor said.

  Pritzker pointed out to Hoelscher that his boss, Trump, was a proud Twitter harasser.

  Pritzker and other governors at the time had been scrambling to get ventilators as well as personal protective equipment and other medical supplies into their states. On a March 16 conference call with the nation’s governors, Trump effectively told them they were on their own and not to think of the federal government as stocking clerks.

  “Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment—try getting it yourselves,” Trump said. “We will be backing you, but try getting it yourselves. Point of sales, much bett
er, much more direct if you can get it yourself.”

  Governors listening in were surprised. At a time of national crisis, the commander in chief was abdicating responsibility to the states.

  “I just got a pit in my stomach,” Rhode Island governor Gina Raimondo, a Democrat, later recalled. “Like, wow, we’re really on our own here. We better get to work. There’s no one else coming, as they say in the military.”

  Later in the day on March 16, Trump rolled out detailed public health guidance—under the banner “15 Days to Slow the Spread”—recommending closing schools, restaurants, bars, gyms, and other such venues, and limiting gatherings to no more than ten people. The president’s demeanor was notably changed from his previous coronavirus briefings, as when he had promised six days earlier that “it will all go away.” This time, Trump was deadly serious. “We have an invisible enemy,” the president said, adding, “This is a very bad one.”

  * * *

  —

  By the middle of that week, after days of coverage of the airport chaos and of his failure to take responsibility for the testing problems, Trump had had enough. On the morning of March 18, just after 8:30, Azar took a call from the boss unlike any he’d had in his career. As he rode to the White House for another task-force meeting, Azar answered his cell phone and took the equivalent of a sustained lion’s roar in the face. The president never even said hello.

  “Alex, testing is killing me,” Trump bellowed. “It’s going to lose me the election! What idiot decided to have the federal government do testing?”

  Azar was taken aback, both by the volume of Trump’s yelling and the mention of testing. Nearly a week earlier, Kushner had arranged a Rose Garden news conference to roll out a half-baked plan for streamlined drive-through testing sites across the country. Azar thought well of Kushner, but also felt the announcement was largely for the appearance of action without any real action. He assumed the president was referring to that.

  “Um, the whole testing idea was Jared’s, Mr. President,” Azar said.

  “Jared didn’t fuck this up,” Trump retorted. “Who fucked this up? Jared is the one fixing your problem. Why is the CDC doing testing?”

  Azar explained that the CDC had a duty to create tests whenever a new pathogen was detected, to help create a model for public health labs and hospitals. And he noted that every major country did the same thing.

  “CDC never should have done this. Never!” Trump yelled. He added, “We should have left this to the states and the private sector. We shouldn’t have owned this.”

  With that, Trump’s concern was coming into focus.

  “Who is responsible for this disaster of testing?” Trump demanded. “Who did the testing?”

  “Well, it was the CDC,” Azar said, thinking to himself that this fact had been well established in many of Trump’s previous briefings.

  “So who does CDC report to?” Trump asked.

  Was the president playing him, or poking him for sport? The question hung there. Two months into a pandemic, after multiple meetings and briefings, was it possible the president didn’t know the chain of command for the critical public health agencies on the front lines?

  “It reports to me,” Azar finally said.

  “Well, then. I have my answer,” Trump said with a harumph. “This was gross incompetence. Just gross incompetence.”

  The president was furious at the CDC, and his primary reason was not that it created a contaminated and malfunctioning COVID test that took weeks to fix, not that America lacked enough tests that could have traced and controlled the spread. He was angry because the CDC had created a political problem for him by agreeing to create a test for the virus in the first place. Barely missing a beat, the president spun to another topic.

  “Larry Ellison called me. He tells me remdesivir works,” Trump said. “So get the FDA to approve it today. And Laura says chloroquine works as a cure. So the FDA has to approve it also.” He was referring to the Oracle founder and to Laura Ingraham, the Fox News Channel host.

  Azar, still a little punch drunk from the testing conversation, explained the FDA didn’t do same-day approvals of drugs or therapies and that it would have to conduct studies to make sure the drugs were safe.

  “Larry, he’s the smartest person I know,” Trump said. “He says it’s safe. Get it approved.”

  “Just because Laura Ingraham takes chloroquine when she goes to Africa, just because Larry Ellison is extremely smart, doesn’t mean we can approve it,” Azar said. “We do what is called clinical trials to study this. We are literally putting it in people’s bodies. It has to be safe.”

  Azar explained that chloroquine treatments, including hydroxychloroquine, were antimalarial drugs that had shown a risk of serious side effects, including blindness, liver toxicity, and heart issues. Although some doctors were prescribing it, the FDA had not approved hydroxychloroquine for safe treatment for the coronavirus.

  “No, these products are safe,” Trump said. “Laura says she takes it all the time and nothing happens. Just approve them. I want these approved today.”

  Azar was an intense, detail-oriented former CEO and lawyer. Though he and the president had often disagreed, Trump’s treatment of him had reached a degrading level he had never expected when he joined the Cabinet. Plenty of critics felt Azar was Machiavellian, always looking for credit and dodging blame, and he could be hard with his subordinates, some of whom chafed at his demands and felt undermined by him. But Azar felt he was being wronged, too. He had worked hard for the president, fought to get him to pay attention to the virus when it grew serious, gotten blamed for mistakes he didn’t consider his own, and been crucified on Capitol Hill for boneheaded positions the White House forced him to take. Riding to the White House after the president hung up, Azar had never felt more demoralized.

  When he walked into the West Wing, Azar paid a visit to Meadows to brief the new chief of staff on his heated conversation with Trump and discuss the very real possibility he might be fired. Meadows listened silently as Azar recounted the president’s tirade.

  “There are many people in the White House who want you removed, but the president has not brought it up with me,” Meadows said.

  Azar and Meadows believed they knew who those people were. They thought Grogan and Short, among others, were gunning for him. Azar decided to set some boundaries with Meadows, in case the president decided to follow through on his critics’ wishes.

  “If he ever tweets against me, I will quit that day. I will never let myself become a Jeff Sessions,” Azar said, referring to Trump’s first attorney general, whom he had tormented relentlessly for more than a year before firing him in November 2018.

  Azar also warned Meadows about the political risk of trying to make him a scapegoat for the administration’s coronavirus response. “ ‘The outside world views me as the competent one,” Azar said.

  Meadows listened, appearing to size up Azar’s points.

  “I got you, buddy,” he said.

  After a few moments, Meadows said: “We gotta figure out how we work on rehabilitating you over here. Listen, you have to follow the law, but you gotta do something to show the president we’re making therapies available. The media is showing all these people being cured from these therapies. Even zinc. We should approve all these products that the media say work.”

  * * *

  —

  Trump was increasingly worried about what the pandemic was doing to his political standing and reached out to an old friend for advice. He called Chris Christie, who had been one of the first establishment Republicans to endorse his candidacy in 2016 and had stood by him through scandals aplenty, and asked him to come to the White House. “No one’s better in a crisis than you. I need you down here,” Trump told Christie, who had won bipartisan plaudits for his aggressive and empathetic leadership in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in
2012.

  On March 19, Christie drove himself to Washington from New Jersey and spent about ninety minutes with the president in the Oval Office. They were alone most of the time, other than the roughly ten minutes when Pence joined them, and brief appearances by Kellyanne Conway and Pat Cipollone. Christie tried to appeal to Trump to rethink his approach to the coronavirus.

  “There is a way to handle a crisis where you meet people’s expectations regardless of how the crisis is playing out,” Christie said. “The way to do that is they expect you to be out there. They expect you to prove to them that you understand why they’re afraid and that no matter how long it takes you’re going to fix the problem.

  “But you’re not doing that,” Christie continued. “You’re telling people that it’s going to just go away, it’s going to magically go away. People don’t want to hear that. You tell people that we’ve got it under control, but it’s clear that we don’t, and so I’m very concerned that what you’re doing is you’re setting yourself up for failure and that people will not believe you after a while.”

  “I’m not going to scare people,” Trump said. “It’s not my job. My job is to reassure people and not scare them.”

  “Yeah, but you only reassure them with the truth, not with the stuff that they know from a common-sense perspective can’t be true,” Christie replied. “No, it’s not under control. No, it’s not just going to go away magically one day. They know that. That’s commonsensical. It’s not like medical training. You just know that.

  “By the way,” Christie added, “if it does, you get all the freaking credit anyway. Who cares? But if you go further out there, extend yourself in terms of your level of concern, your level of preparedness for what the worst-case scenario is, you can always bring it back. If you go short of the mark in the beginning, you can’t ever extend it.”

  Trump told Christie he would rather “tell them it’s going to go away. Chris, when the weather gets warm, it’s going to go away.”