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

by Carol Leonnig

  “The only reason you won last time, Mr. President, is because of the ‘grab them by the pussy’ comment,” Barr said, according to the account he shared with others. “It actually scared you enough to listen to Kellyanne. And for the last several weeks you behaved yourself and you won by a hair. This time it’s different. You cannot wait until the end.”

  Barr saw two reasons that the 2020 campaign was different, but he told Trump only one of them.

  “It’s different because then people were willing to give you a chance,” Barr said. “They sort of wanted a change. You were an outsider who would be an agent of change. Now most people know who you are and you’re going to have to start much earlier to smooth over some of the rough edges.”

  Barr left unsaid the second reason. In 2016, Trump had been a neophyte and knew enough to listen to seasoned advisers like Conway. But now, Trump insisted he was the true political genius—after all, he had defied so many of the pros by winning—and in his hubris, he was disinclined to follow people’s advice.

  Barr told Trump that he was motivated to talk to him that day because he’d been spurred by an old memory of a similar heart-to-heart. He recounted how in 1992, Barr and Jack Kemp, then the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, went in to see Bush in the Oval.

  “Our message to the president was, ‘You’re going to lose this election,’ and unfortunately we turned out to be right,” Barr told Trump. “We were right because we felt that he was falling prey to and was not addressing the image of him as someone who was out of touch with what was happening in the country, and that there was a lot that he could do to address that.”

  “I feel a sense of déjà vu, which is, I think you’re going to lose this election,” Barr continued. “I think that if you wanted to you could walk into a second term, COVID and all. You could go down in history as an amazing president and it’s yours for the taking. But it’s about you, and you’re turning off enough people to lose this election.”

  Trump was oddly silent, not interrupting or trying to regain the floor as he usually did. The president had listened without emoting for a long time. He didn’t ask any questions. He didn’t push back. Now, as Barr’s spiel came to an end, Trump nodded, and said he appreciated the advice. Barr left hopeful that the president had really taken his message to heart, but he couldn’t be sure.

  * * *

  —

  On the morning of April 25, Alex Azar got a call from two aides reaching out to him together with bad news.

  “CNN is about to report that you’re being fired,” one of them said.

  Azar’s job had seemingly been on life support all year, yet a news report that his dismissal was imminent was next level. He called Mark Meadows.

  “That’s not even being discussed,” Meadows told Azar.

  Azar needed to clear his head, so he took a five-mile walk around his neighborhood and nearby trails. Shortly after the CNN story was published, Azar’s phone rang. It was Jared Kushner, who had broken Sabbath on this Saturday to make the call.

  “Alex, this story is just false,” Kushner said. “Completely false. But this crap with Grogan and Seema. We gotta get this straight.”

  Kushner was suggesting the CNN story might be the handiwork of Joe Grogan and Seema Verma, two of Azar’s fiercest critics in the administration, though he could not prove that either were sources for the report.

  As disappointed as he was with Azar’s dysfunctional early response to the pandemic, Kushner believed the secretary had begun turning things around. Operations had improved by ramping up the supply of ventilators and masks, and Kushner believed firing Azar would only add unnecessary drama. He suggested Azar join him the next day at the home of Adam Boehler to talk about mobilizing HHS in the right direction. Boehler was Kushner’s former Harvard roommate who had gone on to work in private equity investing in health-care technology and services and became part of the so-called Slim Suit Crowd. Kushner had earlier arranged for FEMA to take charge of key aspects of the virus response, but he had since become frustrated by the bureaucracy there—not to mention unflattering leaks to the media about Kushner’s work at FEMA—and decided HHS would make a better command center.

  The morning of April 26 brought a downpour of rain in Washington. The Sunday talk shows were still abuzz with the news that Azar would be fired. Azar got a call from Meadows before 10:00.

  “Alex, the stories are false,” the White House chief of staff assured him. “There cannot be sources who are familiar with discussions that haven’t occurred. This is all coming from one source, and that will be dealt with.”

  Meadows didn’t say who he meant, but Azar assumed he was referring to Grogan.

  That afternoon, Azar met Kushner at Boehler’s mansion off Foxhall Road. In a sweet hostess gesture, Boehler’s wife used her new air fryer to make Azar, who had celiac disease, a plate of air-fried vegetable crisps. They sketched out plans for how to score some wins for Team Trump by stockpiling protective equipment and helping speed up vaccines.

  That afternoon, after Azar got home, Trump called him. The president was mild mannered, something Azar had not experienced in many weeks.

  “Listen, I’m not getting rid of you,” Trump said. “Why would I get rid of you with six months to go? Even if you were mediocre I wouldn’t do that. And you’re great, so why would I do that?”

  Azar thanked him for the reassurance.

  “Who’s generating all these stories?” Trump asked. “Where’s all this shit coming from?”

  Azar had one word: “Grogan!”

  “So what should we do?” Trump asked.

  “You have to get rid of him,” Azar said. “He is a cancer on your presidency.”

  Grogan was a cancer, to be sure, but far more on Azar’s future in the administration than on Trump’s presidency. Regardless, Grogan already had decided to leave the administration at the end of May. He had promised his wife he would not stay in the government a day longer than Memorial Day, as they were eager for him to make more money in the private sector and have more time to spend at home.

  Azar told the president what Michael Caputo had encouraged him to keep in mind: attacks on Azar were equivalent to attacks on Trump.

  “These leaks hurt you, not me,” Azar said. “I have not leaked in my life to hurt you. I will defend myself. But I have never leaked to hurt you. We are a team and we are in this together. Together, we have to win in six months.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Trump said. “We are together. You need me to look good for you to look good.”

  Then the president gave the instructions that would end their months of friction.

  “I’m going to post a tweet disputing this story,” Trump said. “You tweet this is ‘fake news’ and I want you to put out a whole list of all the great things we did together on COVID.”

  Azar agreed. Trump went first at 5:53 p.m.: “Reports that H.H.S. Secretary @AlexAzar is going to be ‘fired’ by me are Fake News. The Lamestream Media knows this, but they are desperate to create the perception of chaos & havoc in the minds of the public. They never even called to ask. Alex is doing an excellent job!”

  About twenty minutes later, Azar tweeted: “Reports of President Trump looking to replace me are #FakeNews. The media continues to smear @POTUS and his Administration’s fight against #COVID19 and grossly overlook the historic whole-of-government response that we’ve been delivering under the President’s leadership. While the #FakeNews media and their leaker allies collude to destroy this President, his Administration is following his leadership 24/7 to protect Americans and end a global health crisis.”

  Several agency chiefs who reported to Azar, including Robert Redfield, Stephen Hahn, and Verma, watched this unfolding Twitter volley with confusion and, frankly, disappointment. They had been hearing for weeks from colleagues in the White House that Azar would soon be canned, and they were rootin
g for it privately. They considered him the worst boss. Azar and his senior aides seemed entirely focused on him claiming credit for successes and pinning blame on agency chiefs below him whenever something went south. They considered Azar untrustworthy and completely overwhelmed by the pandemic. Vice President Pence recognized these problems, too, but held his tongue and did not intervene. He had recommended Trump hire Azar as health secretary. Both men knew each other from when Pence was governor and Azar was CEO of Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly. Therefore, Azar’s downfall would have reflected poorly on Pence’s judgment.

  What Azar didn’t know was just how close he had come to losing his job. Trump had not been honest with him when he said he thought he was doing “great.” The president repeatedly had planted the idea of firing the health secretary, including directly with some of Azar’s subordinates. And he went to great lengths to undermine Azar publicly. Trump tightly choreographed the daily coronavirus press briefings in March and April. Sometimes he would make sure all the other administration officials had messages to deliver but left nothing for Azar to say. He also instructed aides to have Azar stand at the edge of the platform, putting him out of camera view. Well aware of Azar’s rivalry with Verma, Trump sometimes told her, “Seema, we want you right over my shoulder,” as if he were trying to antagonize Azar or to make him paranoid.

  Yet in a sign of just how much the president encouraged a Fight Club mentality in his administration, Trump separately told Azar to try to tolerate Verma and that he would get rid of her after he won the election.

  After saving Azar’s job, Trump brought up the topic in a call with Verma.

  “Well, Alex is really close to the edge,” Trump told Verma. “I saved him. People think he needs to go.”

  The president acknowledged Azar’s troubles in the job and told Verma that he decided to keep him for a simple political reason: “It’s not a good idea to change the secretary before the election,” he said.

  But as a senior task-force member later explained, keeping Azar may have been a political mistake, as that left nobody to shoulder the blame for the failed coronavirus response. “Had they taken Azar out, they could’ve said it was all his fault,” this official said. “The fall guy became the president and everybody else in the White House.”

  * * *

  —

  After the CDC issued guidance on April 13 urging people to wear masks when in public settings where social distancing is difficult, a deep divide emerged at the White House. Redfield and his fellow public health leaders wanted administration officials, who often stood close together at news conferences, to lead by example. Redfield knew masks were a critical defense against the virus, and that Americans would take cues from leaders in Washington. He wanted administration officials to present a united “face”—their noses and mouths covered by blue-and-white medical masks. Redfield’s mantra was “Wear a mask. Wear a mask. Everyone wear a mask.”

  Trump, however, would not wear one, and that meant people who wanted to stay in the president’s good graces resisted wearing masks as well, including members of the Secret Service. Task-force members learned from a top Secret Service official that some agents and officers felt masks did not look manly. As the president had put it to reporters on April 3, “Somehow sitting in the Oval Office behind that beautiful Resolute Desk, the great Resolute Desk, I think wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens—I don’t know, somehow I don’t see it for myself. I just, I just don’t.”

  In the intervening weeks, Redfield took it as a personal mission to convince the president and vice president to wear masks. Redfield prodded them gently at every opportunity—especially Pence, whom he considered a softer target. “It’s so important for you to set the example,” Redfield told Pence after a task-force meeting. Pence said he was confident he didn’t have the virus—he was being tested regularly—so a mask seemed redundant. The truth was he wanted to follow Trump’s lead.

  On April 28, the White House resistance to masking came to a head when Pence flew to Rochester, Minnesota, to tour the Mayo Clinic. He visited with patients and staff and toured facilities at the renowned medical center that were supporting COVID-19 research, but did not wear a mask, a violation of the Mayo Clinic’s policy. Video of Pence’s maskless interactions, including greeting a patient in bed, went viral. Here was the chair of the coronavirus task force flouting a hospital’s policy, not to mention the CDC’s recommendations. Everyone else in the video clips wore masks.

  Pence at first defended his decision not to wear a mask, saying he was tested for the virus regularly. “Since I don’t have the coronavirus, I thought it’d be a good opportunity for me to be here, to be able to speak to these researchers, these incredible health-care personnel, and look them in the eye and say, ‘Thank you,’ ” Pence said.

  Two days later second lady Karen Pence would claim on Fox News that her husband hadn’t known about the mask requirement until after the clinic visit. But that wasn’t the full truth. Pence’s staff did know the policy. The Mayo Clinic tweeted on its official social media account, “Mayo Clinic had informed @VP of the masking policy prior to his arrival today.” The tweet was soon deleted, after Marc Short yelled at clinic officials for attempting to embarrass the vice president and for drawing media attention away from the convalescent plasma research Pence had flown to Rochester to promote.

  There was yet more evidence of the Pence team’s prior knowledge of the masking policy. Before the trip, Pence’s office shared guidance with reporters traveling with the vice president about the clinic’s mask mandate and explicitly instructed journalists to wear masks on the trip.

  Two days after the Mayo visit, Redfield got a happy surprise. Pence finally wore a face mask. In a rare public about-face for the Trump administration, the vice president on April 30 visited a General Motors plant in Indiana that had been converted into a ventilator factory—and was photographed wearing a mask as he toured the facility. He would almost always wear it in close public spaces from then on.

  Still, the mask story would continue to dog Pence until May 3, when he acknowledged his lapse in judgment at the Mayo Clinic. “I didn’t think it was necessary, but I should have worn a mask at the Mayo Clinic,” he said at a Fox News town hall event.

  Meanwhile, Redfield’s efforts to convince Trump to wear a mask in public were less successful. He leaned on Dr. Sean Conley, the president’s physician in the White House Medical Unit, for help.

  “Sean, you gotta get the president to wear a mask,” Redfield told him one day around this time. “You gotta get him to wear it for his own protection.”

  Another time, Redfield pressed again, worried about several instances of people in and around the White House testing positive.

  “Sean, you gotta get the president to understand he needs to do this,” Redfield told Conley. “You gotta tell him. You’re his doctor. You gotta tell him.”

  Conley insisted he was trying and he would keep at it. But he turned the dilemma back on Redfield: Didn’t he have patients who didn’t take his advice?

  * * *

  —

  On May 1, a new White House press secretary—Trump’s fourth in three years—stepped to the lectern in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room: Kayleigh McEnany.

  It had been 417 days since a White House press secretary had held a briefing and much had changed. For starters, the number of journalists allowed to attend had shrunk considerably in observance of social distancing rules. McEnany’s predecessor, Stephanie Grisham, never deigned to hold a briefing in her eight months in the job, making her the first White House press secretary in history to abdicate that important responsibility.

  McEnany, thirty-two, was a Harvard Law graduate and had earned Trump’s approval in her fiery cable television appearances. Recruited by Meadows and Kushner, she was attractive, petite, and blond—just the kind of spokeswoman they knew the c
asting-director president would want as his on-camera defender in the run-up to the election. In her first briefing, McEnany revealed a special talent for bending the facts to Trump’s benefit. Reporters were scarred by three straight years of lies and caustic attacks—from the president, his succession of spokespeople, and countless other administration officials—and wondered whether McEnany would be just the latest in Trump’s rotating cast of fabulists and tricksters.

  “Will you pledge never to lie to us from that podium?” Associated Press reporter Jill Colvin asked.

  “I will never lie to you. You have my word on that,” McEnany said, not a frown to be seen.

  It was a striking claim, not only because she worked for Trump, but also because truth had not been a priority for her in the recent past. As a spokesperson for the Trump campaign, McEnany had insisted in late February 2020 that the coronavirus simply wouldn’t reach the United States because Trump would keep it at bay.

  “He will always protect American citizens,” McEnany had told Fox Business Channel host Trish Regan. “We will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here. We will not see terrorism come here. And isn’t it refreshing, when contrasting it with the awful presidency of President Obama?”

  McEnany made this ridiculous comment even though the White House already had confirmed dozens of U.S. cases.

  In the May 1 briefing, despite promising never to lie to reporters, McEnany proceeded to repeatedly stretch the truth. She misrepresented what FBI records showed about agents’ strategy before their famous interview with then national security adviser Michael Flynn. She claimed Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation cost taxpayers $40 million; it had cost $32 million. She claimed the Mueller probe resulted in “the complete and total exoneration of President Trump”; in fact, the Mueller team concluded there was substantial evidence that the president obstructed a criminal probe and that they could not exonerate him. The actual words of the report’s conclusion said: “while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”