Trump and his White House minimize pandemic surge as
he focuses on denying election loss
By
Yasmeen Abutaleb and
November 14, 2020 at 6:43 p.m. CST
President
Trump finally received some good news this past week: Amid spiking coronavirus cases
nationwide — more than 100,000 new cases a day since Nov. 4, with deaths
rising, too — pharmaceutical giant Pfizer announced that its experimental
coronavirus vaccine was more than 90 percent effective.
But the
president was furious.
The news came six
days after Election Day — too late to help Trump in his contest against
President-elect Joe Biden — and he said both Pfizer and his own Food and Drug
Administration had withheld the announcement to prevent delivering him the sort
of pre-election public-relations victory that could have helped him in the
polls. Instead of touting the vaccine success as a crowning achievement of his
administration, as advisers encouraged, Trump barely mentioned it except to
gripe on Twitter that “the Democrats didn’t want to have me get a Vaccine WIN,
prior to the election.”
Since
Election Day and for weeks prior, Trump has all but ceased to actively
manage the deadly pandemic, which so far has killed at least 244,000
Americans, infected at least 10.9 million and choked the
country’s economy. The president has not attended a coronavirus task force
meeting in “at least five months,” said one senior administration official with
knowledge of the meetings who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share
candid details.
Now, as
he fights for his political life, falsely claiming the election was somehow
rigged against him, Trump has abdicated one of the central duties of the job he
claims to want: leading the country through a devastating pandemic as it heads
into a grim winter.
“I
don’t know that I think that’s where his focus is,” said one senior
administration official. “But I know that’s where our focus needs to get back
to.”
This
account of Trump’s indifference and inaction on the newly surging coronavirus
pandemic is based on interviews with more than a dozen administration
officials, Trump allies, health advisers and others familiar with the response,
many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal
deliberations.
On
Friday, Trump appeared in the Rose Garden to offer an update on Operation Warp Speed,
his administration’s effort to fast-track a vaccine. The president and his team
shared some encouraging news: that at least 20 million vaccine doses could be
ready as early as December, with 25 million to 30 million doses
coming each subsequent month. But Trump seemed deflated, with the dour disposition
of a man who understood that the coronavirus progress was too late to help him
in the polls. Biden is projected to win with 306 electoral votes, compared with
Trump’s 232.
Until
his Friday news conference, Trump had barely appeared in public since his Nov.
3 defeat, save for a news conference in which he lobbed baseless claims of
voter fraud and a visit to Arlington National Cemetery for Veterans Day, where
he violated the cemetery’s policy requiring all visitors to wear a mask. He
also made no mention of the rising toll of the virus in his Rose Garden news
conference, which included criticism of Pfizer and attacks on New York Gov.
Andrew M. Cuomo (D).
In one
social media missive, Trump retweeted an angry message that accused CNN of
stopping its “ ‘COVID-COVID-COVID!’
drumbeat” after the election.
Trump
has increasingly eschewed the advice of even his own public health and medical
experts. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, has
proposed several times reducing in-person dining in restaurants and bars, but
Trump has dismissed her suggestions, a senior administration official said. He
has also ignored the calls by Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, for more aggressive messaging on
the importance of mask-wearing, officials said.
The
president is no longer regularly briefed on the pandemic by his team of
doctors, and he rarely reads the daily virus reports prepared by Birx, a senior
administration official said. The reports have grown increasingly grim in
recent weeks, aides said, but are largely ignored in the West Wing. Several of
the administration’s top medical experts — including Birx, Fauci and Surgeon
General Jerome M. Adams — have only infrequently visited the White House in
recent weeks, administration officials said.
Olivia
Troye, a former adviser to Vice President Pence and aide on the White House
coronavirus task force who resigned from the administration and supported
Biden’s presidential bid, described the current situation as “very upsetting.”
“You
would think that now that his presidential campaign is over that he could
perhaps leave a legacy of last-minute leadership during this time — an ounce of
it, maybe,” Troye said. “He has an opportunity here to focus on the well-being
of Americans.”
Jack
Chow, a U.S. ambassador for global HIV/AIDS during the George W. Bush
administration and a former World Health Organization assistant director
general, was similarly alarmed by Trump’s handling of the crisis.
“The
duty of a president is to protect the national security of the United States,
and this is the most prominent disease of mass destruction America’s ever
faced, and we have a commander in chief who has run away from the problem and
has made it worse,” Chow said. “We had an opportunity twice over the past eight
months to bring it down to safer levels, and we failed. We are on the verge of
losing control of this pandemic.”
The
White House disputed much of the criticism of Trump’s engagement with the
coronavirus pandemic. The president is regularly briefed on the topic by Pence,
one administration official said, and Birx has an office in the White House.
“President
Trump and his entire administration remain intensely focused on defeating this
virus and saving lives as Operation Warp Speed continues to fast track
lifesaving treatments and vaccines in record time,” said White House
spokeswoman Sarah Matthews. “Thanks to President Trump’s leadership, we’re on
track to deliver safe and effective vaccines to 20 million Americans in
December and another 25-30 million per month after that. The Task Force
continues to work with state and local jurisdictions to ensure communities have
the tools and resources to better treat patients and protect the most
vulnerable.”
Although
many federal health officials firmly believe more needs to be done to
strengthen the country’s virus response, most are too afraid to call publicly
for firmer action, two people familiar with task force meetings said. For
several weeks, Birx and Fauci pushed to dramatically expand testing, raised
concerns about hospital overcrowding and sounded alarms in public and in
private about the deadly winter the country is hurtling toward — to no avail.
Trump’s
negligence on the pandemic comes at a particularly precarious time, just as his
administration is winding down and Biden and his team are preparing to assume
power, experts said. But Trump — who so far has refused to acknowledge the
election results — is further hindering the process by refusing to start a
formal transition.
One
senior administration official described Trump’s government as performing an
elaborate “Kabuki theater, pretending that Biden didn’t win,” a pantomime that
has further hurt the administration’s virus efforts.
Trump —
who has already fired Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and other top Pentagon
officials — has hinted that he may use his final weeks in office to purge the
government of those he views as disloyal, leaving officials paralyzed by fear
over who might be next, several administration officials said.
In
internal emails, top officials are still refusing to acknowledge the election
results. Some messages include phrases such as “if there’s a transition” and
“if there’s a second term,” one senior administration official said, adding
that there’s little discussion about the coronavirus at the White House.
Experts
said both the Trump administration and the incoming Biden administration need
to send a strong and united message emphasizing that the country is entering
its worst stretch yet of the pandemic and urging people to take the virus
seriously, including by wearing masks and avoiding large gatherings. They also
said the administration needs to assess where personal protective equipment
shortages are and direct resources to those areas, as well as rapidly expand
testing and share information and resources with the Biden team about how to
distribute the expected vaccine.
“If
you’re going to confront the pandemic — and this campaign will extend beyond
Jan. 20 — absolutely they ought to be preparing the Biden team, briefing
them about the landscape of programs, any bottlenecks that they’ve encountered,
so that the Biden team can develop their strategy,” Chow said, referring to
Inauguration Day. “Right now, you have two parallel universes with an iron wall
in between, and if that persists for much longer, the Biden strategy will be
potentially slower and weaker than what is needed to take on the third wave.”
Career
officials across several agencies — including the FDA, the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health — are trying to
quietly work on the pandemic response and take notes on shortcomings, one
senior official said, in the hopes that the Biden administration can address
the problems when it takes over.
Kavita
Patel, a physician and former health adviser in the Obama White House,
described “a lot of frustration” at the staff level in the Trump
administration. Some Trump officials have reached out to her, she said, saying
they want to be helpful to the incoming Biden administration, “but they’re
being told very actively to not speak to anybody.”
“Members
of the Biden-Harris task force are on TV, in the media, talking about the
vaccine, talking about staying at home, making the public messages that I
expected the White House coronavirus task force to do,” Patel said. “We have a
task force now, [but] it’s just a task force from the transition team with
unfortunately no power in the executive branch. The CDC can’t act on
President-elect Biden’s word.”
A
senior White House official said in addition to sending out Birx’s daily
report, the administration has been focused on deploying personal protective
equipment and therapeutics where needed and sending teams to hot spots across
the nation. Subgroups within the broader task force have also continued to meet
regularly, this person added, including a group that consists of Birx, Trump’s
son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, Pence Chief of Staff Marc Short
and Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation Director Brad Smith.
Behind
the scenes, however, many administration officials paint a portrait of chaos,
with senior advisers enabling some of Trump’s most questionable instincts on
the pandemic.
Chief
of Staff Mark Meadows has criticized Fauci and others for being what he viewed as
too apocalyptic about the virus, two administration officials said. Meadows
told others that he believed focusing on the coronavirus hurt Trump
politically.
Some
current and former aides said Meadows also has bizarre views on the virus. He
has told others, for example, that he believes one of the main ways the virus
is spread is through waiters touching the cups of different people at
restaurants, according to people who have heard his comments.
Meadows tested positive for
the virus just after the election, but he told others not to
disclose his condition, according to one administration official.
Two
former administration officials put some of the blame for the laggard White
House response on Kushner. Scott Atlas — a Trump coronavirus adviser who has
espoused the dangerous theory of herd immunity and clashed with the other
doctors — was recruited by Kushner and often spent time in Kushner’s office
suite before he officially took the job, these officials said. They added that
Kushner had been one of the leading voices stressing to Trump the importance of
moving on from the virus.
The
White House — which probably hosted a superspreader event in late September
celebrating the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett — no
longer consults health experts before planning events, including the East Room
celebration on election night that appears to have led to several infections,
two officials said. One person present at the party, who came in contact with
at least two individuals who later tested positive for the virus, said she had
not heard from any White House contact tracers.
Johnny
McEntee, a Trump loyalist who started as the president’s body man and now is
director of personnel for the entire U.S. government, has also told others he
is not concerned about the virus, said people familiar with his comments. He is
engineering much of Trump’s post-election purge of allegedly disloyal
officials.
Yet the
virus has breached the president’s inner sanctum, making it one of the nation’s
notable pandemic hot spots. After an initial outbreak in October that sickened
the president, the first lady and their teenage son, Barron, and other top
White House and Republican officials, a second wave of illness has now hit
close allies of Trump.
In
addition to Meadows, David Bossie, the Trump adviser initially tasked with
overseeing the presidential campaign’s post-election legal strategy, has tested
positive for the coronavirus, as has Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski and about
a half-dozen other administration officials. The chief of staff of the
Republican National Committee also tested positive, along with at least seven
additional RNC staffers.
Experts
worry that Trump’s mishandling of the virus so far is only going to get worse
as the nation heads into winter. Scott Gottlieb, the former FDA commissioner
under Trump, said it was clear the federal government was unlikely to change
its approach, so states need to step up their own efforts.
“The
numbers are going to get very big in terms of hospitalizations and deaths,”
Gottlieb said. “We are just going to have a lot of death and disease.”