The
Entire Presidency Is a Superspreading Event
Down in the polls, high on steroids, and
clinging to good health while endangering everyone else’s.
By Olivia Nuzzi
Donald
Trump was on the phone, and he was talking about dying. It was Saturday,
October 3, and while his doctor had told the outside world that the president’s
symptoms were nothing to worry about, Trump, cocooned in his suite at Walter
Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, was telling those
close to him something very different.
“I could
be one of the diers,” he said.
The
person on the other end of the line couldn’t forget that unusual word the
president used: dier. A seldom-said dictionary standard, it
was a classic Trumpism, at once sinister and childlike. If being a loser was
bad, being a dier was a lot worse. Losers can become winners again. Diers are
losers forever. But aren’t we all diers in the end? Donald Trump, the least
self-reflective man in America, was contemplating his own mortality.
He said
it again: “I could be one of the diers.”
The
previous day, at 12:54 a.m., he had announced that he and the First Lady,
Melania, had tested
positive for
COVID-19 in an outbreak that would sideline
dozens across the West Wing, the East Wing, the highest levels of
the federal government, the military ranks, Trump’s 2020 campaign team, and
prominent supporters in the religious community. The virus had barreled into
the very White House that allowed its spread throughout the United States,
where 213,000 were dead and 7.6 million more were infected amid the biggest
economic collapse since the Great Depression.
As
infections swelled nationwide, the virus made its way inside the president
himself — an epic security failure with no modern analog. It was over a century
ago, amid a pandemic in 1919, that Woodrow Wilson got sick in Paris. His White
House blamed what it called a cold and a fever on the dreary weather. But, in
fact, Wilson was sick with the virus now known as the Spanish flu, which killed
hundreds of thousands of Americans as his administration looked away. One
hundred and one years later, the story of Trump’s “mild symptoms” became less
and less true as the hours ticked by. His fever crept up. His cough and
congestion grew worse. Doctors gave him oxygen and administered a high dose of an
experimental antibody
treatment unavailable to the ailing masses and made
using fetal tissue, a practice his administration opposes, from the drugmaker
Regeneron. Still, he resisted going to Walter Reed. “I don’t need to go,” he
said, according to a person who spoke to him. “I’m fine. I’m fine. We have
everything we need here.”
Persuading
him to leave the White House required an intervention from his doctors, members
of the White House operations staff, the Secret Service, and his son-in-law and
senior adviser, Jared Kushner. They had failed to stop the mass deaths of
high-risk Americans, but they were going to save Trump, the most important
high-risk American of them all. They told him, “This isn’t just your choice.
This really isn’t about you. It’s about the presidency. Our
job is to protect the presidency, and you occupy it.” They asked him to think
about the military and everyone else whose life would be upended if the state
of the country’s leadership was in doubt.
Fine. He
agreed to walk across the South Lawn and board Marine One. The White House said
the move was made “out of an abundance of caution.” In a video posted on social
media, the president hinted that things weren’t so great. He put it this way:
“I’m going to Walter Reed hospital. I think I’m doing very well, but we’re
going to make sure that things work out.”
In the
hospital, Trump’s world shrank overnight in a way it hadn’t since he arrived in
Washington from New York to be sworn into office nearly four years ago.
Contagious and isolated from his family and closest aides, he was accompanied
by Dan Scavino, the social-media director who had first been his caddie and had
survived at his side longer than anyone who wasn’t blood, and Mark Meadows, his
highly emotional chief of staff, who slept in a room nearby, and was attended
to by a team of camera-conscious doctors. In this sterilized confinement, he
tried to distract himself from his illness. He plotted his escape, planned
public-relations stunts, watched TV, and took calls from friends, members of
his staff, and Republican lawmakers. But he remained consumed by what the
doctors told him about his chances of survival. It wasn’t a sure thing.
Nine
months into the pandemic and one month away from Election Day, the president
considered for the first time that the disease killing him in the polls,
threatening his political future, might just kill him, too. On the phone he
remarked sarcastically, “This change of scenery has been great.”
He asked for
an update on who else in his circle had
contracted the virus, though he expressed no regret, no indication that he understood
his own decisions could have led to the infections. Unable to process the irony
of his own misfortune, he tried his best to find the Trumpiest spin. Looked at
one way, he was having the greatest and most important illness of all time. He
had the best care in the world, and he raved about the virtues of the drugs the
doctors had him on, including dexamethasone, a steroid pumping up his lungs
that can induce euphoria. He was awed by the wonders of modern medicine. He
said he was feeling really good, and it didn’t sound like he was lying. Then he
admitted something scary. That how he felt might not mean much in the end.
“This
thing could go either way. It’s tricky. They told me it’s tricky,” the president
said. “You can tell it can go either way.”
Statistically, the
coronavirus is more likely to cost Donald Trump the White House than his life,
though the threat to the latter isn’t helping the former. A little more than
three weeks before the election, potentially contagious and freaking everybody
out, Trump faces what looks like the end of his presidency. “He’s mishandled
the coronavirus, he’s never been popular, and he’s gonna lose badly. I think
it’s pretty simple,” a senior Republican official said. “Of course he was going
to say, ‘Oh look, I feel great! Look how badly I beat this puny little virus!’
Meanwhile, it touches every American’s life every day in multiple different
ways, and he’s handled it badly and people don’t forget that.” Or, as ex–Trump
adviser Sam Nunberg put it, “Everything has just completely gone to shit.”
The polls
suggest not just that the president will lose to Joe Biden but that he might
lose bigly, in a landslide.
When the
coronavirus came to America, the president was preoccupied with more obvious
threats. The first positive case was confirmed in Washington State on January
21, and that same day, as he landed in Davos, the Senate was debating an
organizing resolution for the president’s impeachment trial. In the Alps, he dismissed
the news about the virus at home. “We have it totally under control,” he said.
In fact, the president soon thought that things could hardly be going better.
After
three years of crisis, the election year had begun with his acquittal on
charges of abuse of power and obstruction of justice brought by the House under
Articles of Impeachment. At the same time, the economy was booming. In the
Democratic primary, which would select his opponent for the general election,
the candidate he most feared, Joe Biden, seemed to be choking. And Michael
Bloomberg was threatening to blow the whole thing up anyway. Trump thought
about the last campaign and, ever superstitious, how to replicate its magic. He
was relieved when Hope Hicks, his closest aide, returned to the White House
after two years in exile in Los Angeles. Around the same time, he welcomed back
Johnny McEntee, a former aide he believed to be a MAGA whisperer, capable of
knowing exactly what would appeal to his base. He didn’t think about the
coronavirus much. And then the deaths began.
“If the
president had his way, he’d be back in February,” Newt Gingrich told me. The
former Speaker of the House is an opportunist, and in the era of Donald Trump,
that means he must be an optimist. In 2016, Gingrich supported Trump’s campaign
in the hope that he’d be asked to be the vice-president. Instead, Trump repaid
his loyalty not with power or higher status in history but with the cushiest
gig in Europe: He made Gingrich the husband of the United States ambassador to
the Vatican, based in Rome. Before the pandemic, whenever you’d call the guy,
he was in a loud restaurant — “Hi! Yeah?! This is Newt!” — having the time of
his life. So one might understand why he’s invested in keeping this whole thing
going.
This is what it looks like when the president knows he’s
losing, but it’s also close to what it looked like when he won.
Gingrich
grasps better than most how to stick to a message, and he keeps a straight face
on Trump’s behalf even as he argues things he knows cannot be true. That voter
surveys are skewed by the left-wing media. “I think the election is not quite
like the public-opinion polls,” he says. That the president’s illness is a
political asset. “It gives him a better understanding of what people are going through,”
he says. Or that the president doesn’t mean to imply those killed by the virus
were weak when he says he’ll beat it because he’s strong. “I think he’s talking
about a national attitude. Should it be ‘Hunker down in the basement’ or
‘Reopen the schools’?” he says. Still, he cannot help but break character to
admit the obvious: “If the president had his way, there’d be no virus. There’d
be historically high employment among Blacks and Latinos. But you don’t get to
pick the circumstances in which you run.”
And the
circumstances have grown less pickable each day. “I think some of this is sad
to watch,” Nunberg said. “It’s getting to the point where he’s almost turning
into a laughingstock. What I’m worried about is whether he wants to completely
self-destruct and take everything down with him vis-à-vis the election and the
Republican Party.” He added, “This is a guy who’s not gonna lose joyfully.”
It does
appear at times as though self-destruction may be the point. How else could you
explain the Plague Parade circling Walter Reed, in which a very sick Trump
boarded a tightly sealed SUV with his Secret Service agents so he could wave at
the supporters who had come to fly their flags on the street? Or the Evita-inspired
return to the White House, in which a still very sick Trump ascended the
staircase to the balcony, ripped off his face mask, and saluted to no one as
his photographer snapped away? Or calling in to the Fox Business Channel to
suggest his infection may be the fault of the Gold Star military families,
since they were always asking to hug him? This is what it looks like when the
president knows he’s losing, but it’s also close to what it looked like when he
won — after all, he thought he was losing in 2016, too. We all did. “You’re
never as smart as you look when you win, and never as dumb as you look when you
lose,” according to David Axelrod. In Trump’s case, it may be more like this:
What seems like genius when he manages to survive is the very madness that
threatens his survival in the first place.
A senior
White House official told me there has been an ongoing effort to persuade the
president not to do any of this, as there always is during his episodes of
advanced mania. Asked what the effort looked like this time, with Trump
physically removed from most of the people who might try to calm him down, the
official said, “Well, for starters, it’s unsuccessful.”
One
former White House official said that stopping Trump from doing something
stupid that he really wants to do is possible only if you’re “actually sitting
in front of him.” Sick themselves or trying to avoid a sick president, “the
people he trusts and respects who would be barriers to that behavior don’t seem
to be around,” this person said. “It just looks so chaotic. Duh.”
A second
former White House official said the problem is “now people are so broken down,
to the point where everyone’s been in ‘Jesus, take the wheel’ mode for the last
couple years, and fighting against him is only gonna get them burned. Why even
try?” The president’s staff, this person said, have no ability to think
strategically because the president’s behavior poses new threats to survival
every five minutes. “I don’t think
they’re even considering what happens if he’s back in
the White House and he needs oxygen or a ventilator. Their view is ‘If it
happens, well, we’ll fucking figure it out when it happens!’ ”
Like
Gingrich, they have to stay optimistic. “They aren’t even considering what
happens when he’s feeling worse than he’s feeling now, when he’s hopped up full
of steroids and other performance enhancers. He’s on the sort of drugs you’d
see with a Tour de France rider in the mid-’90s!” Another way to say this, the
former White House official said, was that the president is “hopped up on more
drugs than a Belgian racing pigeon.” In keeping with the bird theme, this
person said the president’s illness was proof that “the chickens are coming
home to roost.”
“Going
back to 2016,” this person added, “you always had these warnings from the
Clinton camp and Democrats and the Never-Trump Republicans that, if he takes
office and if a crisis hits, it’s gonna be a mess. But people don’t really vote
on that when there’s not a crisis. People think, A crisis isn’t gonna
happen! May as well vote for the guy with a good tax policy. Suddenly,
this happens, and you always assume it won’t happen to you, but when you act
like that, bad things happen!”
One
theory of Trump’s self-immolation campaign is that it’s about gaining a sense
of control. “I don’t think he wants to lose. I think he wants to have excuses
for why he did lose,” a third former White House official said. “If it’s the
ballot, the China virus, if it’s Nancy Pelosi. I just think he wants an
excuse.”
As he
considers the end, he fakes his way through a performance of political
possibility. One person who publicly supports Trump and considers him a friend
said that, in conversations with White House and campaign officials following
the president’s release from the hospital, it became clear that no one who was
supposed to know seemed sure when he would be okay. “They’re putting out a big
‘Oh, everything’s fine!’ face. But I don’t think they know how much stamina
he’s gonna have,” this person said. “I didn’t like the way he looked on that
balcony. Last week, I would’ve said that he was definitely going to win. Now, I
don’t know.”
Donald
Trump does not often get sick. The philosophy of Fred Trump decreed that
“sickness was weakness,” Mary Trump told me, “which obviously Donald has
adhered to, which is a big part of the reason we’re in this horrible mess we’re
in.”
Mary
Trump is the president’s niece as well as a psychologist, whose best
seller, Too Much and Never Enough, analyzes
her uncle through the dysfunctional family he came from. In her view, the
president is best understood as a self-unaware Tin Man, abandoned as a small
child by his sick mother and rejected by his sociopath father until he became
useful to him, whose endless search for love and approval plays out as mental
warfare on the Free World he improbably represents. “In order to deal with the
terror and the loneliness he experienced, he developed these defense mechanisms
that essentially made him unlovable,” Mary said. “Over time, they hardened into
character traits that my grandfather came to value. When you’re somebody who
craves love but doesn’t understand what it means — he just knows he misses it
and needs it, but he’ll never have it because he’s somebody nobody loves —
that’s fucking tragic. He still needs to go to prison for the rest of his life.
It’s not a defense. But it’s sad.”
For two
weeks before he died, Fred Trump was hospitalized at Long Island Jewish Medical
Center in what Mary remembers as “a very beautiful corner room with lots of
sunlight.” With her uncle at his father’s bedside, she said, “everyone just
stood around chitchatting, making small talk — they just don’t understand how
to be human.” When his mother was in the hospital, often for osteoporosis and
once after a brutal mugging, Trump visited with an attitude of “Why the fuck
do I have to be here?” she said. “It was of no use to him whatsoever.” When
Mary’s father, Fred Jr., died in 1981, his brother didn’t even show up to the
funeral.
In his
2007 book Think Big, the future president recalled how, a
decade before, he “unexpectedly came down with a wicked case of the flu” in the
middle of his negotiations to buy a newspaper (he didn’t say which one). “I
felt terrible. It was so bad that I called the sellers and told them we would
have to postpone the closing until I was better,” he said, which was “very
unusual” because “I never get the flu. It’s been ten years and I haven’t been
sick a day since then.” Trump didn’t share the story of this freak illness to
reveal his humanity but to add to his myth. He lost out to another buyer in the
end, he said, and he was happy he did because, he claimed, the unnamed paper
turned out to be a bad investment that was some other sucker’s problem.
“Catching the flu was a lucky break that saved me from ruin,” he said.
“Sometimes luck makes better deals than talent.” In other words, the idea that
sickness is weakness, except for when it happens to him, took root a
quarter-century before he made it his case for reelection.
Trump is
aware that he isn’t healthy. His wife, an Eastern European former model who
eats salmon and greens, lengthens her muscles on a Pilates reformer, and glows
as if cast in bronze, is “healthy.” As a 74-year-old who takes the unscientific
position that human beings have a finite amount of energy that exercise
needlessly drains, and who thus never engages in any physical activity more
strenuous than golf or tweeting, and whose vices include red meat, French
fries, ice cream, Oreos, and Diet Coke, he knows he is very much not that.
And he
understood that with age and weight comes heightened risk in the coronavirus
pandemic. But he couldn’t accept that he wouldn’t be fine, that he was part of
the “at-risk seniors” his advisers kept telling him he should think about since
they were an important voting demographic and they were literally dying by the
thousands. What he could accept even less than not being fine was not seeming
fine. His supporters like to imagine him as a cartoonish representation of his
vigorous, manly spirit, a joke directed at anyone who doesn’t find it funny. In
memes, he body-slams his enemies. A video from the Trump campaign, released the
week of his COVID-19 diagnosis, shows him body-slamming the virus. When I
stopped by the home of Willard and Dolly Smith in New Hampshire last month, the
flag on the couple’s front lawn showed Trump’s fleshy face on Rambo’s ripped
body. “I’m back because I’m a perfect physical specimen and I’m very young,”
the president joked on Fox Business on Thursday. But the stabs at
self-deprecation, more necessary at this moment than ever before, do little to
mask deep insecurity. Since his illness, the makeup the president applies
himself has gotten so heavy and so dark that rather than obscure his pale
coloring, it emphasizes the contrast between his unnatural face and the bare
skin of his ears and hands. (All those years spent judging beauty pageants, and
he never learned from the contestants the value of body makeup.)
Personality
is policy in the Trump administration, and the president’s insecurity has made
the uncertainty about the country’s leadership — unavoidable when any chief
executive falls ill — even worse. His unwillingness to admit human frailty has
led the White House and its doctors to keep information about his illness not
only from the public and the press (three members of which have, so far, been
infected at the White House too) but from his
own staff. After Hope Hicks began experiencing symptoms at the Minnesota
MAGA rally on Wednesday, forcing her to isolate in the back of the plane on the
trip home, officials with whom she’d had contact remained in the dark. After
she tested positive on Thursday afternoon, the White House failed to notify
others who would soon test positive themselves. They learned about it when the
world did, not with an official disclosure but with a leak to the media. “The
president could’ve given it to her,” one of those people told me, in fairness,
but “I would’ve done things different that day, had I known.”
Trump did
know, but he didn’t change his plans. At 1 p.m. on Thursday, he flew to his
Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club, for a fund-raiser with hundreds of his
supporters, some of whom he spoke with indoors. Later that night, he tweeted
about Hicks being sick. “Terrible!” he said. “The First Lady and I are waiting
for our test results. In the meantime, we will begin our quarantining process.”
Reading
the message, the person said, “I assumed he must’ve had a preliminary positive one.” The lack of
transparency, this person added, is “symptomatic about how people I work with
always keep the wrong things secret.” Suicidal in all senses, this is the
Trumpian madness that threatens the president’s political and earthly future as
it puts at risk everyone around him.
As one
White House official put it: “Everybody at the top should be fired.”