By Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman
·
Oct. 3, 2020Updated 7:39
p.m. ET
WASHINGTON — As America locked down
this spring during the worst pandemic in a century, inside the Trump White
House there was the usual defiance.
The tight quarters of the West Wing were
packed and busy. Almost no one wore masks. The rare officials who did, like
Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser, were ridiculed by
colleagues as alarmist.
President Trump at times told staff
wearing masks in meetings to “get that thing off,” an administration official
said. Everyone knew that Mr. Trump viewed masks as a sign of weakness,
officials said, and that his message was clear. “You were looked down upon when
you would walk by with a mask,” said Olivia Troye, a top aide on the coronavirus
task force who resigned in August and has endorsed former Vice President Joseph
R. Biden Jr.
In public, some of
the president’s favorite targets were mask-wearing White House correspondents.
“Would you take it off, I can hardly hear you,” Mr. Trump told Jeff Mason of Reuters in
May, then mocked Mr. Mason for wanting “to be politically correct”
when he refused.
This past week, a White House long in
denial confronted reality after Mr. Trump and the first lady both tested positive for the virus, along with Hope Hicks, a top White House aide, and Bill Stepien, the Trump campaign manager, among others.
The outcome appeared shocking but also inevitable in a West Wing that
assumed that rapid virus tests for everyone who entered each
morning were substitutes for other safety measures, like social distancing and wearing masks.
But the outcome was also a byproduct, former aides said, of the recklessness and top-down culture of fear that Mr. Trump created at the White House and throughout his administration. If you wanted to make the boss happy, they said, you left the mask at home.
When the nation went into lockdown in
March, Mr. Trump was determined to play down the virus. He talked of reopening as soon as Easter, April 12, pushed
states to lift restrictions early and pressured schools, churches and
businesses to go back to normal, all in the hope of saving his
campaign.
But behind the White
House gates, Mr. Trump and his aides relied heavily on the daily rapid testing
available to them. At times Mr. Trump took numerous rapid tests throughout the
day.
Aides were divided on the risks. Jared
Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, and Dan Scavino, the White
House social media director, were among the least concerned, colleagues said.
They viewed themselves as protected because of the testing available to them
and maintained that getting the virus was not a death sentence.
Ms. Hicks, a longtime aide who is one
of the president’s closest advisers, was more concerned, colleagues said. She
took more precautions than most others and sometimes wore a mask in meetings.
Colleagues said that newcomers to Mr.
Trump’s orbit, like Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, never
wore a mask in his presence, in what was interpreted by other staff members as
an attempt to please the new boss.
As the months progressed, a small
number of people in the White House tested positive, including a valet to the president, a top aide to the vice president and Robert C.
O’Brien, the national security adviser. But when few others did, aides to the
president grew even less concerned.
By June, the month before Mr.
O’Brien tested positive, the White House had already stopped
conducting temperature checks for people entering the complex. Only those aides
who were interacting directly with the president received daily tests. Masks
remained rare sightings.
The attitude was widespread in the
administration. At the Justice Department in May, Attorney General William P.
Barr told a New York Times Magazine reporter who arrived in a mask for an
interview that “I’m not going to infect you,” and then sat by as an aide
suggested, twice, that the reporter take the mask off. The reporter did.
Even on Friday, only
hours after the president had announced at 1 a.m. on Twitter that he and the
first lady had tested positive, the White House was trying to project that it
was business as usual. “We had a great jobs report this morning,” Mark Meadows,
the president’s chief of staff, told reporters at the White House.
“Unfortunately, that’s not what everybody is focused on this morning.”
Nonetheless, they made every effort to
carry on with a nothing-to-see-here-folks mentality.
Mr. Meadows, who had been in close contact with the president in recent days,
arrived at work without a mask, and continued to claim that a mask was not
necessary because he had tested negative. (Mr. Meadows wore a mask when he
accompanied Mr. Trump, also in a mask, to Walter Reed National Military Medical
Center on Friday evening.)
And although more aides wore masks in
the West Wing on Friday, masks remained optional at the White House, a
spokesman said.
Mr. Meadows also told
reporters on Friday that “I fully expect that as this virus continues to go on,
other people in the White House will certainly have a positive test result.” So
far Mr. Meadows has tested negative.
Late Friday, Kellyanne Conway, a former
top presidential adviser who was at the White House in recent days, announced
that she had tested positive. Others testing positive who had been at the White
House in recent days included Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah; Senator
Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina; Chris Christie, the former governor
of New Jersey; and the Rev. John I. Jenkins, the president of the University of
Notre Dame.
On a policy level, the White House for months has been pressuring the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to
play down the risk of the virus so the president could forge ahead with his
desire to reopen schools, reinvigorate the economy and continue to act as if
the country had “rounded the final turn” when it came to the virus.
Kevin Hassett was a
top economic adviser to the president in May when he became one of the few to
break the unwritten White House rules. In a television interview, he said that
he found it “scary to go to work” and that “I think that I’d be a lot safer if
I was sitting at home than I would be going to the West Wing.”
Mr. Hassett, who left the
administration over the summer, told CNN on Friday that he was criticized at
the time for publicly expressing concern.
“When I was in the
White House, you know, I got a little bit of a flak for saying, ‘Hey, I
understand the risks,’” he said.