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

by Carol Leonnig

  “In a campaign, it’s hard enough for Republicans to get their message out—especially for you—but we need to have discipline and every day, every week have a plan of action, and that means we shut up about everything else,” Barr told Trump.

  Barr practiced what he preached, hoping his appearances promoting Operation Legend would give substance to Trump’s claim to be a law-and-order president. It was a tried-and-true political strategy.

  On September 9, Barr’s tour began in Chicago, one of nine cities where the Justice Department had deployed federal agents—from the FBI, U.S. Marshals Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives—to assist local police. Speaking in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in downtown Chicago, and flanked by federal law enforcement leaders, Barr announced that the coordinated teams of Operation Legend had made more than two thousand five hundred arrests and brought charges against about six hundred defendants. He credited the program with helping reduce Chicago’s homicide rate. He said the number of murders in the five weeks after Operation Legend started had declined by 50 percent from roughly the same period before the program.

  “I am pleased to report that Operation Legend is working,” Barr said. “Crime is down and order is being restored to this great American city.”

  Barr then visited with Chicago police officers and toured the Englewood neighborhood, which is known as the city’s murder capital, with a district commander.

  The next day, September 10, Barr made a similar visit to Phoenix, Arizona, a battleground state. He highlighted a huge federal drug bust that had paired the Drug Enforcement Administration with local law enforcement and targeted the transportation networks that Mexican cartels used in major hubs such as Phoenix and other U.S. cities. Barr said the operation netted nearly 1,840 arrests, as well as the seizure of 28,560 pounds of methamphetamine, 284 firearms, and $43.3 million in drug profits.

  Local newspapers in Chicago and Phoenix carried stories about Barr’s visits. His message about the administration’s handiwork locking up violent offenders reached voters there. But on the morning of September 10, almost on cue, Trump tweeted ominously, “If I don’t win, America’s Suburbs will be OVERRUN with Low Income Projects, Anarchists, Agitators, Looters and, of course, ‘Friendly Protesters.’ ” And that evening, Trump held a campaign rally in Freeland, Michigan, where he alleged that if Biden were elected, terrorists would be welcomed into America and Antifa would rule the suburbs.

  “He’s promised to flood your state with refugees—and you know that as well as I do, and you see it all the time, from terrorist hot spots around the world, including Syria, Somalia, and Yemen,” Trump told his crowd in Michigan.

  With a not-so-subtle bit of race-baiting, Trump then accused Biden of wanting to ruin America’s suburbs by forcing neighborhoods to allow more low-income housing. He described vicious thugs descending on tranquil mostly white neighborhoods and unleashing “crime like you’ve never seen before.”

  “No city, town, or suburb will be safe,” Trump said.

  The president mimicked the tremulous voice of a suburban housewife talking to her husband. “Say, darling, who moved in next door?” Trump said. “Oh, it’s a resident of Antifa. No, thank you. Let’s get out of here. Let’s get the hell out of here, darling. Let’s leave our suburbs. I wish Trump were president. He wouldn’t have allowed that to happen.”

  When his aides relayed Trump’s message of the day, Barr shook his head in exasperation. A few days later, Barr tried to explain to Trump that September 10 was an example of failing to highlight his administration’s accomplishments, such as Operation Legend.

  Trump dismissed this advice out of hand. The president felt Operation Legend was a publicity dud. The name wasn’t catchy enough. The name, sadly enough, was in honor of a four-year-old boy named LeGend Taliferro, who had been shot in the face on June 29 while sleeping in bed, during a string of violent shootings in Kansas City, Missouri.

  “No one cares about Operation Legend,” Trump told Barr. “No one knows what ‘Legend’ is.”

  The president was right. He had also made sure no one would hear about Operation Legend. His predictions of anarchy in the suburbs grabbed most of the headlines.

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  On September 15, Trump notched a rare foreign-policy achievement, welcoming the leaders of Israel, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates to the White House to sign agreements normalizing relations among the countries. The so-called Abraham Accords, named after the biblical father of three monotheistic religions, was an important realignment in the region. The three countries had agreed to open embassies in each other’s countries and establish economic ties, including allowing commercial air travel between Israel and the Emirates for the first time. Together they formed a bulwark against a common enemy, Iran.

  Trump’s customary showmanship defined the elaborate South Lawn signing ceremony, which was punctuated by the sounding of horns and crashing of cymbals. Addressing some eight hundred attendees from the South Portico of the White House, just below the Truman Balcony, Trump declared that the agreement “sets history on a new course.”

  “After decades of division and conflict, we mark the dawn of a new Middle East,” Trump said.

  Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, embattled by a corruption scandal at home, was all too eager to bask in the glow of the American president. “This day is a pivot of history,” he said, standing alongside Trump on the portico. “It heralds a new dawn of peace.”

  In an Oval Office meeting prior to the outdoor ceremony, Trump gifted Netanyahu a large golden key that he said was “a key to the White House, a key to our country.”

  Thanking him, Netanyahu said, “You have the key to the hearts of the people of Israel.”

  “This is peace in the Middle East without blood all over the sand,” Trump said.

  The grandiose proclamations of Trump and Netanyahu belied a relatively narrow agreement. In 2017, Trump and Kushner had set out to broker peace in the Middle East. But the peace plan Kushner had worked on for years with envoys Avi Berkowitz and Jason Greenblatt was rejected by the Palestinians. And the more modest Abraham Accords did not address the thorniest divide and source of tension in the region—the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In fact, the Palestinians responded to the agreements among Israel, Bahrain, and the Emirates by launching rockets into Israel from Gaza at roughly the same time as the White House ceremony.

  Nevertheless, the agreements broke the dam and gave Kushner, who had long been mocked for being naive enough to think he could bring about peace in the Middle East, a durable accomplishment. Mideast analysts said the Abraham Accords represented a tangible, meaningful diplomatic achievement, albeit something less than the original goal. They said the joint agreements signaled the potential for a broader rapprochement to come, should more Arab states conclude, as Bahrain and the Emirates had, that Iran posed a greater threat to their security than Israel.

  That didn’t stop Trump from overselling his accomplishment, however. The president suggested to aides, perhaps only half jokingly, that the agreement should be called the “Donald J. Trump Accord.” And his campaign took out Facebook ads falsely declaring that Trump had “achieved PEACE in the MIDDLE EAST” and celebrating his nomination for the “Noble Peace Prize,” misspelling Nobel. Trump was indeed nominated for the prestigious prize by an anti-immigration crusader whose name was largely unknown in the United States. Christian Tybring-Gjedde, a far-right member of the Norwegian parliament, had nominated Trump for the prize once before, along with a former Dutch politician who had been critical of Islam’s treatment of women.

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  Behind the scenes starting in May and continuing throughout the summer, Robert Redfield pushed to add millions of dollars to the CDC’s budget to help distribute the coronavirus vaccines once they had been approved for use. He knew the country sorel
y lacked a robust public health infrastructure and that the states lacked the money, staff, and expertise to handle the rapid and massive delivery of vaccines necessary to bring an end to the pandemic. Redfield referred to the orderly distribution of millions of doses of vaccines as the “last mile.” Several pharmaceutical companies were racing to develop and manufacture vaccines, but that wasn’t the end of the road. The last mile was making sure states could safely and efficiently administer shots to their residents.

  Other top officials in the administration did not seem to grasp the importance of this. Meadows had been a vocal critic of the CDC when he was in Congress, pushing a bill to reduce its mission and budget by roughly half and to limit its purview to infectious diseases. Meadows had argued the CDC was overstepping by providing its health recommendations on environmental health risks, chronic diseases like obesity and diabetes, and other subjects. As White House chief of staff, Meadows resisted several of Redfield’s requests for additional funds during the pandemic. Azar, who oversaw the CDC as the secretary of health and human services, echoed the White House line that the CDC didn’t need the additional funds.

  Starting in June, as Redfield conferred with congressional appropriators about growing the CDC’s budget with supplemental funds, Meadows proactively stepped into the budget discussions to say the White House objected. Redfield learned from a legislative aide that, at Meadows’s direction, the White House’s legislative affairs staff dive-bombed a negotiated increase for the CDC’s budget.

  “Meadows just took the money out,” the aide told Redfield.

  “No, you don’t know that,” Redfield said, insisting it couldn’t be true.

  “Yeah,” the aide said, “I do know it.”

  Redfield had been arguing at White House task-force meetings that his focus on the “last mile” was a necessity. He pointed out that with Operation Warp Speed, the government had found money to build factories to ramp up the speed of manufacturing vaccines, which he applauded.

  “Just as important as that is for you to get the money to CDC so we can distribute it to the states so they can begin to set up their last mile distribution mechanisms,” Redfield told colleagues on the task force. “It’s not going to help us to have a bunch of vaccine and still have these states not ready to really function at that high capacity.”

  Redfield and his team had worked with officials in sixty-four different jurisdictions in all fifty states, all of whom would oversee vaccine distribution, to draft a detailed blueprint for how to get vaccines to their residents. They did tabletop exercises to walk through how local authorities would launch distribution operations, starting as early as January 2021. They had the plans. What was missing was the money to pay for it.

  As the discussion over CDC funds continued, Meadows coincidentally called Redfield one day for medical advice. A former constituent of his in North Carolina had a difficult health problem and Meadows asked Redfield what advice he would give. Redfield was more than happy to help. But he took the opportunity at the end of the call to tell Meadows how important the “last mile” money was. Redfield believed Meadows was extremely smart, and had an elephant’s memory, able to repeat back to aides what they had said months earlier. Redfield also knew from experience that it was extremely difficult to move Meadows off his stated position. The chief listened politely, but that was it.

  Despite this resistance in his own chain of command, Redfield had powerful supporters in Congress in both parties who shared his belief that vaccine distribution funding for the CDC was critical. They included Senator Roy Blunt, the Republican chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee for health and human services, and Senator Patty Murray, the subcommittee’s ranking Democrat. Redfield conferred with them privately about gaps in the country’s public health system to handle this wartime endeavor.

  Agency chiefs or even Cabinet members were not supposed to contradict the president by asking for more money than what was proposed in the budget. Redfield was supposed to keep quiet and be happy with whatever the CDC got. He had been warned by his own staff that Azar and his team were instructing him not to say anything about seeking more emergency funds. “You’re not to do this,” one Azar aide told a senior Redfield deputy.

  But by September, Redfield could no longer be silent. He took a public stand. First, he had a series of private calls with Blunt and Murray to tell them time was running out and the whole country was in trouble if the CDC didn’t snag emergency funds in the billions of dollars.

  Redfield told one of his deputies, “This is so important that if I get fired by telling Congress what is needed, so be it.”

  Blunt and Murray went to work. As the subcommittee chairman and a member of Trump’s party, Blunt had more sway with the White House, and he made Redfield’s mission—getting people safely vaccinated as fast as possible—his own. On September 9, Blunt sent a formal letter to Redfield expressing concern about plans for vaccine distribution and asked in writing a question he already knew the answer to: Did the CDC have enough money to make this happen? Blunt wrote that he feared the CDC would need supplemental emergency funding to achieve this goal. Then Blunt gave Redfield cover to say what he needed to say in public by scheduling a hearing on the matter and calling on the CDC director to testify.

  At the hearing, on September 16, Redfield’s question-and-answer session with Blunt, Murray, and other senators might as well have been scripted. The senators raised their worries about the speedy delivery of vaccines and the large sums the CDC would need to make it happen, and Redfield answered their probing questions honestly, as required. Redfield incensed the White House by saying that the CDC and its partners needed $6 billion to help states create the infrastructure needed to distribute vaccines. Without it, he testified, the delivery would be jeopardized. The funds had been proposed in pandemic relief legislation that Congress had not yet adopted.

  For the White House, the hearing got worse. When Murray asked about the state of the CDC’s budget, Redfield revealed that the administration had transferred $300 million from the CDC to the Department of Health and Human Services’ public affairs office. Almost all that money was slated to be used for a public relations campaign “to defeat despair and inspire hope” about the virus, ahead of the election, Redfield said. Worse still, he said that the CDC had not been asked to provide scientific expertise for the campaign.

  The presentation infuriated Azar, who was ready to fire Redfield.

  Redfield also angered Trump when he provided a grim timetable for vaccine distribution that contrasted with the rosy forecasts the president had been giving. The CDC director told the Senate committee that he believed most Americans wouldn’t have access to a vaccine until the late spring or summer of 2021, and possibly not until that fall. Trump had been pegging the vaccine rollout to the fall of 2020, around the time of the election.

  A top deputy to Azar called Redfield as soon as the hearing broke to ask what in the world he was doing; the CDC director had been instructed not to publicly contradict the president’s budget. “I have a higher calling to tell the truth,” Redfield replied.

  Speaking to reporters that evening, Trump reiterated his timetable, and said that Redfield, despite having spent months planning vaccine distribution with the states, might not have all the facts. “We think we can start sometime in October. So as soon as it’s announced, we’ll be ready to start,” Trump said at the top of his news conference. “We’ve manufactured all the necessary supplies, so as soon as the FDA approves the vaccine, and as you know we’re very close to that, we’ll be able to distribute at least one hundred million vaccine doses by the end of 2020, and a large number much sooner than that.”

  When a reporter pressed Trump about how this squared with Redfield’s timeline of mid-2021, the president claimed to reporters that he had called Redfield and that the director had not offered this timeline to him, though Trump had actually not called Redfield that day. “I think
he made a mistake when he said that. It’s just incorrect information,” Trump said. “I think he got the message maybe confused. Maybe it was stated incorrectly.”

  When another reporter asked the president what the American people should believe, after he had twice contradicted the CDC director’s prepared testimony before Congress, Trump, furious by now, cut the reporter off.

  “He’s contradicting himself,” Trump said, referring to Redfield. “You know what I think? I think he misunderstood the . . . I told you. I don’t have to go through this. I think he misunderstood the questions. But I’m telling you. Here’s the bottom line. Distribution is going to be very rapid. He may not know that. Maybe he’s not aware of that. When he said it, I believe he was confused. I’m just telling you. We’re ready to go, as soon as the vaccine happens.”

  Redfield took more arrows. Meadows appeared on Fox News the morning of September 17 and said the CDC director was uninformed and confused.

  “If I were a betting man, I would bet on President Trump,” Meadows told the hosts of Fox & Friends. He added, “I’m not sure where Dr. Redfield got his particular timetable, but it is not based on those that are closest to the process.”

  The chief of staff’s broadside raised the question of who was closest to the process, if not the CDC director.

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  One September afternoon, amid his scramble to secure more vaccine funding, Redfield paid a visit to Michael Caputo’s office at HHS. As they often did when they had some time to kill between meetings, the two men made espresso from a small machine Caputo kept near his desk and chatted about what was going on in the administration. It was a rare moment to relax. Then Redfield noticed a lump on Caputo’s neck.