Trump had reassured his own supporters during the New Hampshire rally on February 10 that “the virus is going to be fine.” A few days earlier, he made comforting remarks to manufacturing workers in Michigan, claiming that “we have it very well under control.”
But on February 24, as the World Health Organization acknowledged that it wasn’t clear whether the virus could be stopped from spreading across the globe, investors realized that Trump’s rosy assessment couldn’t be trusted. The Dow dropped more than 1,000 points—its biggest point decline in more than two years—as shares of travel, health insurers, and high-flying technology stock were among the hardest hit. American Airlines Group dropped 8.5 percent, UnitedHealth Group slumped 7.8 percent, and Facebook fell 4.5 percent. The sell-off jarred Trump, at least momentarily.
“Other than yesterday, which was something pretty bad, with respect to the virus, and we’ll see what happens,” Trump said at an event in India, referring to the stock market crash.
Covid, he added, was “a very serious thing.”
But Trump quickly returned to his magical thinking and the message that he’d been drilling home for the past two months, that the virus was “going to go away.”
“Things like that happen where—and you have it in your business all the time—it had nothing to do with you,” Trump said. “It’s an outside source that nobody would have ever predicted. If you go back six months or three months ago, nobody would have ever predicted. But let’s see. I think it’s going to be under control.”
The next day brought another slide in the markets, which Trump blamed on Dr. Messonnier’s statement. From the Air Force One flight back to Washington from India, Trump called Azar in the middle of the night and threatened to fire the CDC doctor unless he could keep her on message.
“She’s scaring the shit out of people!” Trump shouted.
Azar held his own news conference before markets closed that day and said that the virus was “contained.” But it did nothing to distract from Messonnier’s warning that the virus might force schools to close, conferences to be canceled, and businesses to keep their employees home.
“We need to be preparing for significant disruption,” she said.
When Air Force One arrived back home at 6:30 in the morning on February 26, Trump knew the stock market was under considerable duress in the seventy-two hours he’d been gone, but he didn’t know how to fix it. That evening, after markets closed, Trump held a news conference and contradicted the exact thing he’d told Woodward two weeks earlier.
“This is a flu,” Trump said. “This is like a flu.”
At the time, Brad was down the street from the White House at the National Republican Senatorial Committee, where he gave a private briefing for senators about the state of the campaign. Still feeling empowered by the validation he’d received from Trump over the polls, he told the Republican senators that they would keep the Senate, and that the Trump campaign would help them do it. He laid out plans to expand the presidential campaign’s reach into New Mexico, which Republicans had lost in six of the previous seven presidential contests, and Minnesota, which they’d lost fourteen of the past fifteen.
Later than night, Brad and Scavino sat with Trump watching TV in the private dining room off the Oval Office. When Senator Lindsey Graham called to gush about Brad’s presentation, Trump, without telling him, put the senator on speakerphone.
“That kid’s a fucking genius!” Graham said.
“Brad?” Trump said.
“He might be the smartest guy in politics,” Graham said.
“Yeah,” Trump replied. “That’s why I got him!”
As February drew to a close, Trump took to a campaign rally stage in North Charleston, South Carolina, where he said that recent headlines about his handling of coronavirus were nothing more than the political heir apparent to the Mueller probe and impeachment.
“This is their new hoax,” Trump said.
The first report of a Covid-related death came the next day: a Seattle man in his fifties with underlying health conditions—or as Trump described him during a news conference, “a wonderful woman.”
Two days later, on Monday in Charlotte, North Carolina—for the final packed arena rally in what was supposed to have been a year full of them—Trump promised a vaccine would be ready “relatively soon.” On Tuesday, he said his administration was hustling to develop Covid therapies—“sort of another word for cure.”
On Wednesday, he estimated the death rate from Covid was “way under 1 percent” during an interview on Hannity.1 On Thursday, at a Fox News town hall in Joe Biden’s hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, Trump falsely blamed Obama for the delay in Covid testing.
On Friday, he signed a $8.3 billion emergency spending package for hospitals and states to fight Covid, falsely claimed that Covid tests were available to everyone who wanted one, called Washington governor Jay Inslee a snake, and said he was opposed to letting a cruise ship full of sick passengers dock because it would add to the national count of coronavirus cases.
That night, he fired his chief of staff.
The morning after Trump was impeached in December, the first item in Politico Playbook was news that one of the president’s staunchest defenders, Representative Mark Meadows, planned to resign from Congress. Meadows told Playbook that he’d spoken to Trump about finding a way “we can work more closely together in the future.” He then spent the first two months of 2020 taking meetings and lunches with various Washington power brokers to solicit opinions and advice on how he should run the White House chief of staff’s office. His longtime friend, Mick Mulvaney, was still the acting chief—a title he’d had for fifteen months at that point—but Meadows made clear that it was only a matter of when. Still, Mulvaney didn’t see it coming.
The night before Mulvaney was fired, Jared had called and tried to warn him.
“For the first time the president actually said, ‘Maybe we should go in a different direction,’” the president’s son-in-law told the White House chief of staff.
Mulvaney recognized it as a bad omen, but he hadn’t been told there was a decision or a pending announcement. There wasn’t much time to dwell on what it all meant because, just a few hours later, the White House was alerted that there may have been a coronavirus outbreak inside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, where the president was scheduled to visit the next day on his way down to Mar-a-Lago for the weekend.
The White House scotched that CDC leg of the trip, but Covid test results from the public health agency came back negative just as Trump was boarding Marine One the following morning. Trump wanted to put the CDC visit back on the schedule.
“Let’s just swing by,” Trump told his team. “We’re flying right over Atlanta.”
Deputy White House chief of staff Emma Doyle had just started reassembling plans to return to the CDC when Trump turned to Jared inside Marine One.
“Have you told her what we’re doing?” Trump asked.
Doyle looked up from her phone.
“No, I didn’t want to,” Jared said. “I didn’t want to violate Mick’s confidence.”
Doyle had worked for Mulvaney as a legislative assistant in the House of Representatives, as his chief of staff when he was director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, and now as his principal deputy in the staff chief’s office. Had Mulvaney known this was coming, she would have been one of the very first people he’d have told.
“You can tell her,” Trump said. “Maybe she’ll stay.”
Doyle was about to have a very different day than what she’d expected.
Trump explained that he thought it was time to make a change. He said he was considering Meadows as a replacement.
“What do you think?” he asked Doyle.
Doyle told the president she knew Meadows as a House member and forced out a few other neutral descriptors. Marine One landed at Andrews Air Force Base, and Trump climbed out of the helicopter.
Doyle pleaded with Jared to hold off until Monday. She happened to have been standing in the chief’s office in July 2017 when Trump fired his first chief of staff, Reince Priebus, on the rain-soaked tarmac at Joint Base Andrews—a mortifying finale for what had been a mostly humiliating six months on the job for Priebus. But it might have been even worse for his staff, who had watched with shock as the news played out on television in nearly real time. Doyle was desperate to avoid a similar situation, and she asked Jared for more time so she could prepare the rest of Mulvaney’s team—and so that he could be the one to tell his wife and kids. Her request was rejected.
Doyle texted Mulvaney from the plane—they needed to speak in private immediately.
“Today’s the day,” Doyle wrote.
Trump called Mulvaney later that evening, thanked him for the work done, and told him he could have any job in government he wanted—except the one he had right now. That night, a few minutes past 8:00 p.m.—about ten minutes after he’d arrived at Mar-a-Lago—Trump posted the tweet that announced Meadows would be his next and fourth chief of staff and that Mulvaney would become the U.S. special envoy for Northern Ireland.
“Thank you!” Trump added.
The morning after Mulvaney’s ouster, coronavirus cases had been reported in more than half of the states in the union. New York and Washington state had both declared public emergencies. Carnival’s Grand Princess cruise ship, with more than twenty-one infected passengers and crew, was idling off the coast of California. But that morning, Trump’s focus wasn’t on the pandemic.
Sitting in his club with a few guests, staff, and Pence, the president showed his visitors a mock-up of a logo for the Republican National Convention, which was still more than five months away.
“I don’t really like the way the elephant’s nose is shaped,” Trump said. “And there are only three stars. It should be five stars. Like a five-star hotel.”
Trump cared deeply about the convention, but this preoccupation was something different. One way Trump relieved stress or calmed his nerves was to find trivial issues to agonize over and master. Multiple White House aides had been included in long and painstakingly detailed strategy sessions aimed at picking out the playlist for what classic rock tunes to play over the loudspeakers at his next rally. For a president in the opening days of a pandemic, the harsh truth was there was very little he could easily control. So instead, he crawled into the minutiae of the convention logo, and now he was rolling.
“Jon Voight is coming to the convention,” Trump continued. “He’s a big star. He was in Midnight Cowboy. That was a great movie.”
It might have been a bit of a stretch to talk about Voight’s stardom in the present tense—the dues-paying member of Mar-a-Lago had starred in Midnight Cowboy in 1969.
“Kanye West is going to be the keynote speaker,” Trump said. “I had him in the Oval Office with Jim Brown. And even Jim Brown turned to me and goes, ‘This guy’s a fucking lunatic.’ And he is! He’s crazy. But he’s going to help me win reelection.”
As Trump burrowed in on the convention, coronavirus crept right into his club.
That night, Fox News host Tucker Carlson visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Carlson was serious about the virus. He had chastised the media on his prime-time show earlier in the year for spending more time covering the impeachment than the virus. And now Carlson’s wife, Susan Andrews, was pushing him to deliver the same rebuke to the president. He had a direct line to Trump and needed to deploy it to focus on the seriousness of coronavirus, she urged.
“This will cost you the election,” Carlson warned him.
But Trump shrugged him off and said the virus wasn’t as deadly as people thought.
That night, Trump dined with Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro and a delegation from South America’s largest country, seventeen of whom would test positive a few days later, including Fabio Wajngarten, Bolsonaro’s communications director, who was photographed standing shoulder to shoulder with Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
Trump ended his weekend in Mar-a-Lago with a packed Sunday night campaign fundraiser that included at least one donor who would test positive for Covid within days.
Trump suddenly seemed eager to focus on the virus a couple of days later when he returned to Washington, U.S. stocks were in the midst of their worst day since 2008, including a 7 percent drop in the Dow sparked by coronavirus fear and a price war for oil stemming from a clash between Saudi Arabia and Russia. Meanwhile, several Republican House members in Trump’s inner circle, including Meadows—the man he’d just named his new White House staff chief—had quarantined themselves after learning that, the week before, they had spent time with someone at CPAC, the annual conference of young conservative activists, who had tested positive for the virus. Matt Gaetz, the Florida congressman, was on Air Force One lifting off from Palm Beach International Airport when his staff called to tell him about the exposure. It had been eleven days since his contact, but there still were no clear guidelines on how to handle a potential exposure. Gaetz isolated in the rear of Air Force One until the end of the flight, when Trump summoned him back to the front of the plane. Trump wanted to check on Gaetz, who stood in the doorway and refused to enter the president’s cabin.
“Do we need to wrap you in cellophane?” Trump asked him.
“I’ll jump out of this plane without a parachute if it’s necessary,” Gaetz told him.
Trump returned to the White House and surprised aides with a sudden resolve to address the contagion.
“I want to do something big,” he told them.
That night, Carlson, unsure if his warning had resonated with Trump, did something sure to get the president’s attention: He repeated his blunt commentary on the Fox News airwaves.
“People you know will get sick,” Carlson said that night. “Some may die. This is real. That’s the point of this script—to tell you that.”
Carlson didn’t mention Trump by name, but explained that the nation’s leaders weren’t taking the issue seriously.
“People you trust—people you probably voted for—have spent weeks minimizing what is clearly a very serious problem,” Carlson said as he stared directly into the camera, as if directing his warning to the president himself. “It’s just partisan politics, they say, calm down. In the end this is just like the flu and people die of that every year.”
On March 11, two days after Trump had returned from Mar-a-Lago, Brad, Fabrizio, and McLaughlin arrived in the Oval Office to share with Trump the final results of their poll.
Their presentation did not unfold as they’d expected.
The map they handed Trump wasn’t as optimistic as Brad had first described, but it still showed the president with more than 270 electoral votes and a good chance to exceed the 306 votes he’d won in 2016. Fabrizio explained that voters had long said the economy was in good shape, but more people were now personally feeling the effects from it, and Trump was getting the credit. In 2019, about one-third of voters in the target states said they were better off than they had been a few years earlier. That number was up to almost 50 percent at the start of 2020, and it was making a difference for the president. For the first time, Trump’s job approval was a net positive across all seventeen battleground states.
Trump threw the map back at them.
“A lot of fucking good this is going to do me,” he told them. “These numbers are all worthless. This China virus is going to wreck the economy, and that’s going to be the end of me.”
Trump’s sulking was about to be put on display for a national TV audience in what would prove to be one of the most significant pivot points of the pandemic.
Just bef
ore his briefing with Brad and Fabrizio, Trump had raised the prospect of a national address from the Oval Office to announce new travel restrictions on the European Union, but still hadn’t made a decision.
Advisers debated the wisdom of doing so, believing it could lend urgency and weight to one of the most precarious moments of Trump’s presidency. The proposal sparked a three-and-a-half-hour meeting with Trump inside the Oval Office with Pence, Azar, acting Homeland Security secretary Chad Wolf, and a bevy of aides, including Ivanka, Jared, and Hope, who all urged Trump to deliver a national address to reassure the country that the administration did, in fact, have a serious response to the rapidly spreading coronavirus. Kellyanne argued against the address. The moment didn’t require a prime-time speech, she said, instead urging the president to stick to a more controlled situation, like recording a video he could post on Twitter. As he listened to both sides, Trump was in a serious and somber mood. They were still discussing the best course of action when World Health Organization director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus held a news conference to announce that Covid, with nearly 120,000 cases around the world and more than 4,000 confirmed deaths, was now considered a pandemic.
“He seems sad,” Derek Lyons, the staff secretary, observed of Trump.
Trump was resigned to restricting travel from Europe, showing none of the pushback that he’d given the team six weeks earlier ahead of the China decision. He said he wanted to give the speech live, but still aides weren’t sure it would happen.
“He still has another meeting this afternoon,” Lyons said to Jared, pointing out Trump’s previously scheduled discussion with executives from some of the country’s biggest financial institutions. “I’m not sure he’s going to do it.”
“Frankly, We Did Win This Election”: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost Page 12