Inside the Failure: 5 Takeaways on Trump’s Effort to
Shift Responsibility
President
Trump and his top aides sharply shifted their pandemic strategy in mid-April
after seizing on optimistic data suggesting the virus would disappear, a Times
investigation found.
·
July 18,
2020Updated 4:22 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON — President Trump and his
top aides decided to shift primary responsibility for the coronavirus response
to the states during a critical period of weeks in mid-April, eagerly seizing
on overly optimistic predictions that the pandemic was fading so the president
could reopen the economy and focus on his re-election, a New York Times investigation found.
The investigation revealed that
critical decisions about the handling of the virus during that crucial period
were made not by the better known coronavirus task force, but by a small group
of White House aides who convened each morning in the office of Mark Meadows,
the president’s chief of staff.
One
of their goals: to justify declaring victory in the fight against the virus. In
that effort they frequently sought validation from Dr. Deborah L. Birx, a
highly regarded infectious disease expert, who was the chief evangelist in the
West Wing for the idea that infections had peaked and the virus was fading
quickly.
Despite
warnings from state officials and other public health experts, Mr. Trump stuck
to a deliberate strategy by pushing responsibility onto the states almost
immediately after introducing reopening guidelines. Then he quickly undermined
the guidelines by urging Democratic governors to “liberate” their states from
those very restrictions.
Interviews with more than two dozen
senior administration officials, state and local health officials, and a review
of emails and documents, show how a critical period in mid-April set the nation
on a course to a new surge, with the United States logging more than 65,000 new
cases of the virus each day.
Here are some of the key findings:
The
room where it happened.
Officials in the West Wing viewed the
White House coronavirus task force as dysfunctional, and they were increasingly
dismissive of Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease
specialist, and officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
who they believed had been wrong in their early judgments about the course of
the virus.
As a result, important elements of the
administration’s strategy were formulated out of sight in Mr. Meadows’s daily
meetings, populated by aides who for the most part had no experience with
public health emergencies and were taking their cues from the president.
The
group convened each morning at 8 as the coronavirus crisis was raging in April.
In addition to Dr. Birx, the participants included Joe Grogan, the president’s
domestic policy adviser; Marc Short, Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of
staff; Russell T. Vought, the president’s acting budget director; Chris
Liddell, a deputy chief of staff, and Jared Kushner, the president’s senior
adviser and son-in-law; Hope Hicks, the protector of Mr. Trump’s brand; and
Kevin A. Hassett, a top economic adviser.
In the bureaucratese of their meetings,
they referred to their goal as orchestrating a “state authority handoff.” As
Mr. Meadows would tell people, “Only in Washington, D.C., do they think that
they have the answer for all of America.”
Dr.
Birx: White House optimist.
Dr. Birx was more central than publicly
known to the judgment inside the West Wing that the virus was under control and
on a downward path.
But
her model-based assessment of the outlook failed to account for a vital
variable: how Mr. Trump’s rush to urge a return to normal would undercut the
social distancing and other measures that were holding down the numbers.
During the morning meetings in Mr.
Meadows’s office, Dr. Birx almost always delivered what the new team was hoping
for: “All metros are stabilizing,” she would tell them, describing the virus as
having hit its “peak” around mid-April. The New York area accounted for half of
the total cases in the country, she said. The slope was heading in the right
direction. “We’re behind the worst of it.”
During much of mid-April, Dr. Birx
focused intensely on the experience that Italy had fighting the virus. In her
view, it was a particularly positive comparison, telling colleagues that the
United States was on the same trajectory as Italy, where there were huge spikes
before infections and deaths flattened to close to zero.
Dr. Birx would roam the halls of the
White House, sometimes passing out diagrams to bolster her case. “We’ve hit our
peak,” she would say, and that message would find its way back to Mr. Trump.
Trump
was in a box: More testing meant more reported cases.
The president quickly came to feel
trapped by his own reopening guidelines, which put him in a box of his own
making.
States needed declining cases to
reopen, or at least a declining rate of positive tests. But more testing meant
overall cases were destined to go up, not down, undercutting the president’s
insistence that the priority was to get the economy cranked up again.
The result was to intensify Mr. Trump’s
remarkable public campaign against testing, which was among the most vivid
examples of his rejection of any informed leadership role. And it highlighted
how Mr. Trump often ended up at war with his own administration’s experts and
stated policies.
Mr. Trump shifted from stressing that
the nation was already doing more than any other country to deriding its importance.
By June the president was regularly making nonsensical statements like, “If we stop testing right now, we’d
have very few cases, if any.”
Trump’s
handoff of responsibility had consequences
The president’s bizarre public
statements, his refusal to wear a mask and his pressure on states to get their
economies going again left governors and state officials scrambling to address
a leadership vacuum that complicated their efforts to deal with the virus.
In one case, Gov. Gavin Newsom of
California was told that if he wanted the federal government to help obtain the
swabs needed to test for the virus, he would have to ask Mr. Trump himself —
and thank him.
After
offering to help acquire 350,000 testing swabs during an early morning
conversation with one of Mr. Newsom’s advisers, Mr. Kushner made it clear that
the federal help would hinge on the governor doing him a favor.
“The governor of California, Gavin
Newsom, had to call Donald Trump, and ask him for the swabs,” recalled the
adviser, Bob Kocher, an Obama-era White House health care official.
Mayor Francis X. Suarez of Miami, a
Republican, said that the White House approach had only one focus: reopening
businesses, instead of anticipating how cities and states should respond if
cases surged again.
“It was all predicated on reduction,
open, reduction, open more, reduction, open,” he said. “There was never what
happens if there is an increase after you reopen?
The
White House was slow to recognize it had been wrong.
Not until early June did White House
officials even began to recognize that their assumptions about the course of
the pandemic had proved wrong.
In task force meetings, officials
discussed whether the spike in cases across the South was related to crowded
protests over the killing of George Floyd or perhaps a fleeting side effect of
Memorial Day gatherings.
Digging
into new data from Dr. Birx, they soon concluded that the virus was in fact
spreading with invisible ferocity during the weeks in May when states were
opening up with Mr. Trump’s encouragement and many were all but declaring
victory.
Even
now, there are internal divisions over how far to go in having officials
publicly acknowledge the reality of the situation.
