JOKE
OF THE WEEK
Gidley, who is often in
meetings with her and Trump, said: “No one has to give President
Trump advice about being presidential—he is just a natural-born leader—and in this
time of crisis, the country clearly sees the president is focused on the safety
and security of the American people and always has their backs.”
“The
Campaign Panicked”: Inside Trump’s Decision to Back Off of His Easter
Coronavirus Miracle
An impulsive promise (“His view was: I need to
show people there’s a light at the end of the tunnel”) led to Fauci pushback.
Poll numbers—and a friend in a coma—pushed Trump to reverse course.
APRIL 1, 2020
The national debate set off by Donald Trump’s
announcement that he wanted churches packed on Easter was, like so many Trump
crises, a self-inflicted one. In the days after Trump tweeted that “WE
CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF,” his medical advisers,
led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, implored Trump not to relax the
government’s social distancing guidelines. Trump dug in. “His view was: I need
to show people that there is light at the end of the tunnel,” a former West
Wing official told me. Under pressure, members of the coronavirus task force
discussed privately how parts of the country might be opened in April, but
cautioned Trump not to get locked into a specific timetable given the
deteriorating conditions in New York hospitals and ominous upticks in cases in
New Orleans, Detroit, and elsewhere. “They discussed it internally, but they
never intended Trump to announce it,” a Republican working with the task force
told me.
Trump’s impulsive
decision—and its messy aftermath—consumed the West Wing during the critical
week that governors were pleading with the White House to deliver medical
supplies before hospital systems began to collapse. “It was totally crazy,” the
Republican told me. Dr. Fauci, Senator Lindsey Graham, and
others raced to convince Trump that an Easter opening would be a cataclysmic
error that could cost millions of lives. “This is a very, very stressful
situation for everybody, including me,” Fauci told me in a phone interview on
Monday. By last weekend Fauci’s arguments broke through: Trump agreed to extend
the social distancing guidelines until the end of April.
Trump’s latest tonal and
tactical shift (and almost certainly not the last) was driven by several
factors, both personal and political. Trump learned that his close friend,
78-year-old New York real estate mogul Stan Chera, had contracted
COVID-19 and fallen into a coma at NewYork-Presbyterian. “Boy, did that hit
home. Stan is like one of his best friends,” said prominent New York
Trump donor Bill White. Trump also grew concerned as the virus
spread to Trump country. “The polling sucked. The campaign panicked about the
numbers in red states. They don’t expect to win states that are getting blown
to pieces with coronavirus,” a former West Wing official told me. From the
beginning of the crisis, Trump had struggled to see it as anything other than a
political problem, subject to his usual arsenal of tweets and attacks and
bombast. But he ultimately realized that as bad as the stock market was,
getting coronavirus wrong would end his presidency. “The campaign doesn’t
matter anymore,” he recently told a friend, “what I do now will determine if I
get reelected.”
For an ordinary West Wing
dealing with a crisis of this magnitude, the chief of staff would be a central
player, mediating, delegating, making the trains run on time. But Trump has
only very intermittently been able to tolerate another person with power in his
White House. Mick Mulvaney had essentially been a lame duck
for months, and since he was pushed out in early March, there’s been no chief
of staff at all—Mark Meadows, whom Trump appointed weeks ago, only
resigned his congressional seat on Monday to fill the post. “How can you not
have a chief of staff during one of the biggest crises in American history?” a
former West Wing official said.
Jared Kushner, who’s
often been in competition with Trump’s chiefs of staff, continues to be the
central West Wing player, leading a shadow coronavirus task force that is more
powerful than the official group led by Vice President Mike Pence. In
conversations Kushner has blamed HHS Secretary Alex Azar for
the criticism Trump has received, according to a person in frequent touch with
the West Wing. “This was a total mess,” Kushner told people when he got
involved last month. “I know how to make this government run now,” he said,
according to a source.
The White House downplayed tensions between Kushner and the task
force. “The vice president and Jared work so well together because they both
view their roles through the lens of what’s best for the American people and
how do we best serve the president,” deputy press secretary Hogan
Gidley said. “The task force has orchestrated a massive historic
partnership between the public and private sector, coordinated the federal
government’s urgent response, and has unleashed a whole-of-America approach
that will save lives.”
In recent days Kushner
has advocated for his usual, iconoclastic public-private approach, drawing on
business contacts. Last week he called Wall Street executives and asked for
advice on how to help New York, people briefed on the conversation said. Kushner
encouraged Trump to push back against New York governor Andrew Cuomo after
Cuomo gave an emotional press conference during which he said New York was
short 30,000 ventilators. In a White House meeting around this time, Kushner
told people that Cuomo was being an alarmist. “I have all this data about ICU
capacity. I’m doing my own projections, and I’ve gotten a lot smarter about
this. New York doesn’t need all the ventilators,” Kushner said, according to a
person present. During an interview on Hannity on March 26,
Trump said: “I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators.”
Kushner declined to
comment. But the White House press shop sent a statement from Fauci: “The
interactions between Jared Kushner and Vice President Pence have added real
value to the discussions at the coronavirus task force. They complement each
other very well by providing information and opinions derived from shared and
sometimes different perspectives. The bottom line and goal of both of them is
to always get the facts straight and to act on and make decisions based on the
best available evidence.”
Meanwhile, Trump is also
consulting his longtime confidante Hope Hicks, whom Trump
hired back in February (Hicks had been serving as chief communications officer
for Fox Corp., the parent company of Fox News). Officially, Hicks reports to
Kushner, but according to sources, Hicks is constantly with Trump. “Hope is in
charge of Trump’s calendar, which means Jared is in charge of Trump’s
schedule,” a Republican who deals with the White House said. Sources said Hicks
prepares Trump for his daily task force briefings and advises him to act
presidential. “She’s been trying to play to his better angles,” a former West
Wing official said. (Given Trump’s recent blowups at reporters Yamiche
Alcindor and Jim Acosta, Hicks’s influence has its
limits.)
Hicks declined to
comment. But Gidley, who is often in meetings with her and Trump, said: “No one
has to give President Trump advice about being presidential—he
is just a natural-born leader—and in this time of crisis, the country clearly
sees the president is focused on the safety and security of the American people
and always has their backs.”
In many ways Hicks fills
the role she unofficially occupied during her first West Wing tour: Trump
whisperer. She is shaping the White House’s messaging, which puts the current
communications director, Stephanie Grisham, out of the loop.
For weeks, according to sources, Kushner has been looking to sideline Grisham
but has been unable to displace her because Grisham remains close to Melania
Trump, whom Grisham did communications for when she worked in the East
Wing. “Jared doesn’t tell Grisham what he’s working on. At this point Stephanie
has just given up,” a person close to Grisham said. “That is blatantly false
and a sick attempt by someone to stoke division where there is none"
Gidley said. "Steph and Jared have been friends since the campaign and
have always worked very well together.”
Trump’s press conferences for the last few weeks had mostly been
rally substitutes—boastful, contentious, featuring Trump as pitchman, selling
the great job the administration was doing and the beautiful future after the
novel coronavirus had magically flowed through, while compulsively
blame-shifting to China, the media, governors, anyone but his own
administration. But on Tuesday the event turned somber, with Trump trying to
put the best possible face on a terrifying set of metrics—100,000 to 200,000 dead
Americans, even if, as Dr. Deborah Birx said, safety measures
continued—that he’d been trying to push away and wish away for weeks. Whatever
his tone, it will be a very hard future to sell.