The lost days of summer: How Trump struggled to
contain the virus
By
Josh
Dawsey and
August 8, 2020 at 6:23 p.m. CDT
As the
White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows is responsible for coordinating the
vast executive branch, including its coronavirus response.
But in closed-door meetings, he has revealed his skepticism of the two
physicians guiding the anti-pandemic effort, Deborah Birx and Anthony S. Fauci,
routinely questioning their expertise, according to senior administration
officials and other people briefed on the internal discussions.
Meadows no
longer holds a daily 8 a.m. meeting that includes health professionals to
discuss the raging pandemic. Instead, aides said, he huddles in the mornings
with a half-dozen politically oriented aides — and when the virus comes up,
their focus is more on how to convince the public that President Trump has the
crisis under control, rather than on methodically planning ways to contain it.
During
coronavirus meetings, Meadows has repeatedly questioned the scientific
consensus that wearing masks helps contain the spread of the novel coronavirus,
officials said. He has regularly raised with Fauci and others a range of issues
on which he thinks Fauci has been wrong, and he personally monitors the
infectious-disease expert’s media appearances. When he catches Fauci sounding
out of sync with Trump, the chief of staff admonishes the doctor to “stay on
message,” officials said — and he has impressed upon Fauci, Birx and other
public health professionals that they should not opine on restrictions or make
policy in the media.
In an
interview Saturday, Meadows said he has been appropriately skeptical of
information presented to him but disputed that he is anti-science.
“My
comments to all of our doctors is that they need to stick with the science,
comment on the science and do not become media commentators and opine on what
may or may not happen,” he said. “I’ve been consistent from the very first day
I was here. I want us to question every assumption that we make and rely only
on the facts that are before us. When we are communicating to the American
people, we need to make sure that any comments that we make are backed up by
good modeling, good analysis and are free from commentary.”
Meadows
is not alone in being
skeptical of medical expertise, part of the politics-first,
science-second attitude that has become pervasive inside the White House this
summer — and which has been championed foremost by Trump.
“It’s
one thing to question science, and it’s another thing to attack science,” said
a former senior administration official.
If the
administration’s initial response to the coronavirus was denial, its
failure to control the pandemic since then was driven by dysfunction and
resulted in a lost summer, according to the portrait that emerges from
interviews with 41 senior administration officials and other people directly
involved in or briefed on the response efforts. Many of them spoke only on the
condition of anonymity to reveal confidential discussions or to offer candid
assessments without retribution.
“Right
now, we’re flying blind,” said Thomas Frieden, a former director of the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention. “Public health is not getting in the way of
economic recovery and schools reopening. Public health is the means to economic
recovery and schools reopening. You don’t have to believe me. Look all over the
world. The U.S. is a laggard.”
Under
mounting pressure to improve the president’s reelection chances as his poll
numbers declined, the White House had what was described as a stand-down order
on engaging publicly on the virus through the month of June, part of a
deliberate strategy to spotlight other issues even as the contagion spread
wildly across the country. A senior administration official said there was a desire
to focus on the economy in June.
It was
only in July, when case counts began soaring in a trio of populous,
Republican-leaning states — Arizona, Florida and Texas — and polls showed a
majority of Americans disapproving of Trump’s handling of the pandemic, that
the president and his top aides renewed their public activity related to the
virus.
Some
White House officials defended the administration’s response to the surge of
infections in the summer, describing the current effort as all-hands-on-deck and
saying Trump is now heavily engaged personally and holds regular briefings.
Aides express confidence that the United States is in a stronger position now
than in March or April, with an improved supply chain for ventilators and
personal protective equipment, and with advancements in therapeutics and in the
development of a vaccine.
“While
the media would rather speculate on palace intrigue with anonymous sourcing,
President Trump and his entire Administration continue to lead a
whole-of-government response to defeat the virus from China, expedite
treatments and vaccine development, and reopen our economy safely,” White House
deputy press secretary Judd Deere said in a statement Saturday. “The President
wants to see America healthy, prosperous, and again safely open for business,
and that’s what we are all working toward.”
Trump
and many of his top aides talk about the virus not as a contagion that must be
controlled through social behavior but rather as a plague that eventually will
dissipate on its own. Aides view the coronavirus task force — which includes
Fauci, Birx and relevant agency heads — as a burden that has to be managed,
officials said.
Yet the
virus rages coast to coast, making the United States the world leader, by far,
in the number of confirmed coronavirus cases and deaths. An internal model by
Trump’s Council on Economic Advisers predicts a looming disaster, with the
number of infections projected to rise later in August and into September and
October in the Midwest and elsewhere, according to people briefed on the data.
The
forecast has alarmed the president and his top aides, even as some have chosen
not to believe it, arguing that some previous projections did not materialize.
Trump, meanwhile, has continued to insist publicly that the virus is
“receding,” as he described it recently.
Skepticism
of scientific projections abounds inside the West Wing. During an Oval Office
meeting last month to discuss the Republican National Convention celebration
planned for Jacksonville, where coronavirus cases had been surging, advisers
informed Trump and other advisers that Birx had warned that they should be
prepared for a large percentage of people potentially testing positive.
“Oh, if
Doctor Birx says it,” Meadows quipped derisively, questioning the assumption
that as many people would get the virus as she said, according to people in the
room. The Jacksonville celebration ultimately was canceled.
Marc
Short, chief of staff to Vice President Pence, who chairs the coronavirus task
force, and other administration officials both senior and junior operate with a
similarly skeptical attitude toward the administration’s scientists, officials
say.
These
aides serve as Trump’s bureaucratic muscle, acting upon the views of a
president whose public statements have revealed his ignorance of how the
pathogen works, impatience with doctors’ recommendations and faith in a “cure”
that could soon return life to normal.
Nearly
seven months after the first coronavirus case was reported in the United
States, there still is no national strategy to
contain the outbreak — other than the demands, some of them contradictory, that
Trump issues on Twitter or at news conferences. “OPEN THE SCHOOLS!!!” the
president decreed in a tweet Monday.
'An
unmitigated disaster'
As the
nation confronts a once-in-a-century health crisis that has killed at least 158,000
people, infected nearly 5 million and devastated the
economy, the atmosphere in the White House is as chaotic as at any other time
in Trump’s presidency — “an unmitigated disaster,” in the words of a second
former senior administration official.
In the
weeks ahead, the administration plans to draw more attention to the push to
develop and test a coronavirus vaccine, and to the government’s plan for mass
distribution, together dubbed “Operation Warp Speed.” Aware that the public could
view this as a politicized effort ahead of the November election, the
administration plans to use public health professionals to promote the vaccine
project and to limit the president’s personal involvement in the promotional
campaign so it is not viewed as a “Trump vaccine,” according to a senior White
House official.
Trump’s
new campaign manager, Bill Stepien, has argued that Trump and campaign
surrogates should talk more forcefully about the virus to help reverse the
president’s downward polling trend, according to a campaign official.
Sen.
Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who has played golf with Trump throughout the
pandemic, argued that the president could change voters’ minds about the
administration’s handling of the crisis by more aggressively blaming the virus
on China and stirring hopes for a vaccine.
“He has
a better story to tell than he has told so far,” Graham said.
Over
the past two weeks, the White House communications staff has worked with Birx,
Fauci and other public health professionals on what they have deemed an “embers
strategy” — a reference to snuffing out an emerging fire — to help prevent
spikes in metropolitan areas that internal data project could see a rise in
cases. Aides deployed the doctors and other experts to deliver stark warnings
and reiterate best practices in local media interviews in an array of such
markets, including Indianapolis and Minneapolis, as well as throughout the
states of Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin, which also happen to be election
battleground states.
Trump,
meanwhile, has tried to project an image of competence and control by resuming
regular news briefings in which he reads from a script containing a flurry of
statistics and other updates on the virus’s spread.
Trump’s
recent performances have won plaudits from Fauci and others.
“I’m
pleased that the president has gone out there and is saying things now that I
think are important, that have to do with wearing masks, staying away from
crowded places,” Fauci said. “Also, they’ve been short and crisp, which I think
is good when you’re trying to get a message across.”
Former
New Jersey governor Chris Christie (R), a Trump confidant who also is a
lobbyist for some hospitals, agreed. “I think his focus on encouraging the
American people to wear masks, to letting them know that we are going to be in
this for a while and we have to remain strong and resolute about it, I think
are all things that are very, very important,” he said.
But in
recent interviews, several governors and mayors in some of the nation’s
hardest-hit areas questioned the president’s credibility and the value of his
presentations.
“You
can be out front, but if you’re not providing accurate and truthful
information, it can hurt rather than help,” said Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner
(D), whose city has been a major hot spot. “Correct information is vital.
People are listening, and they will respond based on what they’re hearing. And
they look to their leaders at all levels of government. … That trust factor is
critical. If you lose that, it’s very difficult to govern.”
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, said, “It’s extraordinary that a country that helped eradicate
smallpox, promoted HIV/AIDS treatment worldwide and suppressed Ebola — we were
the world’s leader in public health and medicine, and now we can’t even protect
our own people from the most devastating epidemic in decades.”
House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Trump’s push for a speedy return to normal
had deadly consequences. Asked who was to blame for the pandemic’s dark summer
turn, Pelosi said, “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”
“The
delay, the denial . . . the hoax that it’s going
to go away magically, a miracle is going to happen, we’ll be
in church together by Easter, caused death,” Pelosi added.
'A
Potemkin village'
In
Trump’s White House, there is little process that guides decision-making on the
pandemic. The president has been focused first and foremost on his reelection
chances and reacting to the daily or hourly news cycle as opposed to making
long-term strategy, with Meadows and other senior aides indulging his impulses
rather than striving to impose discipline.
“Trump
likes knocking down dominoes, and there’s nobody left to stop the cascade of
dominoes,” said Anthony Scaramucci, a former White House communications
director who has become a Trump critic but remains close to some of Trump’s
aides. “He sits in the Oval Office and says, ‘Do this,’ or, ‘Do that,’ and
there was always a domino blocker. It was John Bolton or H.R. McMaster on
national security or John Kelly. Now there are no domino blockers.”
What’s
more, with polls showing Trump’s popularity on the decline and widespread disapproval
of his management of the viral outbreak, staffers have concocted a positive
feedback loop for the boss. They present him with fawning media commentary and
craft charts with statistics that back up the president’s claim that the
administration has done a great — even historically excellent — job fighting
the virus.
When
“Fox News Sunday” anchor Chris Wallace told the president during a recent
interview that his claim that the United States had one of the lowest
coronavirus mortality rates in the world was “not true,” Trump grew agitated and
called for White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany to hand him one of his
charts.
“Kayleigh’s
right here,” Trump told Wallace. “I heard we have one of the lowest, maybe the
lowest mortality rate anywhere in the world.”
A
senior administration official involved in the pandemic response said,
“Everyone is busy trying to create a Potemkin village for him every day. You’re
not supposed to see this behavior in liberal democracies that are founded on
principles of rule of law. Everyone bends over backwards to create this
Potemkin village for him and for his inner circle.”
One
reason for Trump’s long-standing reluctance to wear a mask — although he
sported one Thursday during a factory visit in Ohio — is the concern that his
prized political base, which has held steady in its approval of him, is not
enthusiastic about wearing them. That argument has been made several times
privately to the president by Johnny McEntee, his former campaign “body man”
who now directs the White House Personnel Office, according to two officials.
McEntee
“loves to update the president,” as one of them put it, on what his voters are
saying about issues, including the pandemic, and has spoken to the president at
length about how his base does not trust some members of the task force or the
guidance on masks or shutdowns.
Government
health officials are wary of saying anything publicly — even if they are merely
speaking truth — that might be construed as contradicting the president or
countering his rosy assessments.
One of
the clearest examples of how fear and loyalty have infected the response came
in Trump’s decision last month to begin formally withdrawing the United States
from the World Health Organization. Many government officials hoped the
president would not take that drastic step, but none had the courage to try
forcefully to persuade him against a withdrawal by explaining that doing so
would risk damaging not only the global response to the virus but also the U.S.
response.
“Everybody
is too scared of their own shadow to speak the truth,” said a senior official
involved in the response.
When
Fauci was asked in an interview last week whether
he would recommend voting by mail because of the pandemic, the doctor demurred
because, he said, “that almost certainly is going to be used as a sound bite.”
As many states ramp up their mail voting systems to provide options for voters
who prefer not to physically go to polling sites because of the coronavirus,
Trump has been claiming — without evidence — that voting by mail is susceptible
to massive fraud.
“It’s a
sport now in Washington to pit me against the president, and I don’t really
want to do that,” Fauci said. “But someone will take a quote and, bingo, it’ll
be me against the president, and I don’t want to do that.”
Birx
recently showed what can happen when one speaks truth. Last Sunday on CNN, she
said the United States had entered a “new phase” of the pandemic with the
“extraordinarily widespread” outbreak reaching into rural as well as urban
areas.
Trump,
who had been describing the virus as receding, complained privately for much of
that afternoon and the next day that Birx had taken too negative a tone and
should have focused instead on the states where case counts are declining,
advisers said.
Trump
took to Twitter to suggest she “took the bait & hit us” because Pelosi had
criticized the doctor for her frequent praise of the administration’s
coronavirus response. “Pathetic!” he tweeted, though a few hours later, he told
reporters of Birx: “She’s a person I have a lot of respect for.”
In
recent weeks, Birx had delivered versions of that message privately to state
and local officials during her visits to various states that were in the White
House’s “red zone” or at risk of slipping into it. Behind closed doors, she bluntly
warned elected leaders seeing spikes that their states could quickly become the
next Florida or Louisiana, according to officials in Tennessee, Mississippi and
Ohio who met with Birx, as well as other people familiar with the discussions.
Birx’s
private counsel at times stood in contrast to her decidedly less-alarmist
public stance. Last week, for instance, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R) gave her
the floor during a meeting in Nashville. Birx skipped over pleasantries and
told Tennessee’s leaders that they were at risk of encountering Florida’s fate
if they did not mandate masks statewide and shut down bars, according to an
official involved in the state’s response who learned of the discussions from
two participants. A participant in another meeting with Birx and Lee that day
also said Birx was unequivocal about the need for a statewide mask mandate.
But
during a public news briefing with Lee, Birx hedged when asked directly whether
her recommendation was that the governor require face coverings statewide,
instead citing bullet points from a federal report. And Lee, left to
characterize their conversations, claimed he had her backing for a different
approach.
Gillum
Ferguson, a spokesman for the governor, did not dispute the characterization of
the private meetings but said Lee and Birx were in “broad agreement about the
goal, which is to get more Tennesseans to wear masks.”
A White
House official disputed that Birx had hedged in her recommendation of
mask-wearing.
Local
officials in other states said Birx took pains to provide off ramps even when
issuing forceful recommendations. In Ohio she advised the closing of bars but
said another option would be to limit the hours of operation, said Mysheika W.
Roberts, health commissioner in Columbus, where Birx participated in meetings
at the end of July.
“She
comes across as very knowledgeable,” Roberts said, “but not pushy.”
A
breakdown in order
Although
Fauci, Birx and other medical professionals sit on the coronavirus task force,
many of the more pressing decisions lately have been made by the smaller group
that huddles in the morning and mostly prioritizes politics. The cadre includes
Meadows, senior adviser Jared Kushner and strategic communications director
Alyssa Farah.
The
policy process has fallen apart around Meadows, according to four White House
officials, with the chief of staff fixated on preventing leaks and therefore
unwilling to expand meetings to include experts or to share documents with
senior staffers who had been excluded from discussions. This breakdown in
order, for instance, has given room for trade adviser Peter Navarro to push his
ideas directly with Trump and to submit an opinion piece to USA Today attacking
Fauci.
Asked
to grade Meadows’s performance, Christie, who resisted Trump’s entreaties in
2018 to serve as chief of staff, said, “Incomplete, so far. . . . He’s still
getting to know the ropes, getting used to everything, and working with this
president up close every day is a much different experience than being one of
his supporters on Capitol Hill. I’m sure the chief is learning that now.”
Health
officials said they have been dismayed that there is no consistent message from
the White House advising what people should be doing to help stem the tide of
coronavirus infections, such as wearing masks and social distancing. Some
internal administration models suggest that full adherence to those measures
could yield the same result as the shutdown, and officials recognize that it
would be better for the public health and psyche of the nation and the economy
if the country could avoid another full shutdown.
Luciana
Borio, a director for medical and biodefense preparedness at the National
Security Council during the first two years of the Trump administration,
decried “a response in disarray hampered by a lack of clear, consistent public
health-oriented guidance to the public.”
“It’s
very difficult to know who to trust,” Borio said. “To expect the public to sort
out the facts in a time of tremendous stress leads to inconsistent and
disparate actions, and that really hurts our collective effort to fight the
virus.”
What
also has frustrated a number of the president’s allies and former aides is that
he simply seems uninterested in asserting full leadership over the crisis,
instead deferring to state leaders to make the more difficult decisions while
using his presidential bully pulpit to critique their performances. He
deputizes Pence to handle much of the actual communication with states and
other stakeholders in the fight against the virus.
“If we
want to return to school safely, we need not only adaptive safety practices at
the schools but also lower amounts of virus in each community,” said Tom
Bossert, a former White House homeland security adviser under Trump. “A
suppression-level effort to shrink and not just mitigate the spread of covid
requires a national strategy that includes standards and significant federal
funding. Such a strategy is lacking right now.”
Trump
has solicited advice on the virus from a medley of voices, with anyone gaining
access to him able to bend his ear about possible treatments. The chorus
includes Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham, who has paid regular visits to
the Oval Office to discuss hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malarial drug that
Trump promoted as a cure for the coronavirus despite scientific studies showing
that the drug if used as a treatment could have deadly side effects.
The
president recently hosted Andrew Whitney, a biopharmaceuticals executive on the
board of a company called Phoenix, who met in the Oval Office with Trump.
Whitney, who has a limited health background, pitched Trump on a botanical
extract called oleandrin as a treatment for the coronavirus, according to two
senior administration officials with knowledge of the discussion.
One
official said Mike Lindell, a Trump booster and the chief executive of MyPillow
— who stars as pitchman for his product in advertising on some of the Fox News
shows Trump watches — helped arrange the meeting. Since then, Whitney has
personally made overtures to senior leaders at the Food and Drug
Administration, including its commissioner, Stephen Hahn, in an effort to get
the agency to approve oleandrin as a treatment for the coronavirus.
The
agency, which declined to comment, has not made any sort of approval. Whitney
and Lindell did not respond to requests for comment.
“If
people were left to their own devices, this would be the next
hydroxychloroquine,” the official said.
Trump’s
faith in hydroxychloroquine has inspired other Republican politicians to echo
his enthusiasm, never mind the dangers raised by medical experts, putting a
political gloss on what would otherwise be considered scientific facts.
Asked
in an interview last week about the drug, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) acknowledged
he was not a doctor and had no medical assessment but added, “What’s strange
about this is, in today’s political environment, everything is viewed through a
lens of Trump. So, because Trump said positive things about hydroxychloroquine,
suddenly a lot of the left, a lot of the media said, ‘Oh, my God, it’s the
worst thing on Earth. You can’t prescribe it.’”
'It is
what it is'
Since
the start of the pandemic, the U.S. response has been plagued by a chronic
shortage of diagnostic tests, the supplies needed to run them and the lab
capacity to process them in a reasonable time to maximize their effectiveness,
according to state officials.
The
Trump administration has resisted devising a national testing program and
instead ceded the task to state governments, even as cases of infection average
more than 60,000 a day and some people wait 10 days or longer for test results,
delays that render the results essentially useless.
State
officials, leaders of the American Medical Association and other medical groups
as well as some officials in the administration have pushed for a stronger
federal solution to the problems of testing.
While
some states have been able to largely meet the needs of their populations, the
federal government is the only entity with the power to coordinate testing
across state lines, push and enable manufacturers to increase production of
test kits and supplies, surge those supplies as needed and ensure fair payment.
Without federal coordination, states, businesses, hospitals — and soon schools
and universities — find themselves competing with each other for limited
supplies, often overpaying as a result.
To be
sure, the government has succeeded in vastly increasing the nation’s testing
capacity; there are now about 800,000 tests a day on average. But that is far
short of the 5 million tests per day that experts said the country should be
able to perform in the summer.
“Even
if the government interceded much more aggressively on testing, there’s going
to be a lag on when that increased manufacturing capacity might come to bear,”
said Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer of the Association of State and
Territorial Health Officials. “We’d really like to scale up and have more
effective contact tracing, and we’re challenged by the testing right now.”
Despite
repeated calls to invoke the Defense Production Act to help resolve
testing-supply shortages, the administration has resisted doing so. Trump and
several White House aides have instead continued to think that it is
politically advantageous to cede the issue to the states to avoid taking
ownership or blame for the issue, even though testing shortages are largely
seen as a federal failure.
“The
thing that disturbs me is I think the public has to know it doesn’t have to be
this way,” said Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.) said. “Other countries have
taken this virus seriously, trusted their public health officials and
scientists, and now they’ve flattened the curve,” he said. “Meanwhile, our
situation gets worse and worse every day and some Americans think, ‘Oh, that’s
just the way it is.’ But that isn’t how it has to be.”
Even
Trump has taken to sounding defeatist at times, as if he had given up trying to
save lives. When the president claimed in a recent interview for HBO that the
virus was “under control,” Axios reporter Jonathan Swan interjected.
“How?”
Swan asked. “A thousand Americans are dying a day.”
“They
are dying, that’s true,” Trump said. “It is what it is.”
Some
people familiar with Trump’s thinking said the president is preternaturally
averse to difficult challenges that don’t produce immediate results.
“He’s
just not oriented towards things that even in the short term look like they’re
involving something that’s hard or negative or that involves sacrifice or
pain,” a former senior administration official explained. “He is always anxious
to get to a place of touting achievements and being the messenger for good
news.”