Conspiracies, Dysfunction, and Arrogance: How the Trump Administration Set Back the US Coronavirus Response by Weeks

Florida governor Ron DeSantis, a close Trump ally in a crucial swing state, wanted to keep beaches open-and Trump bowed to pressure. (photo: Steve Nesius/Reuters)

By Gabriel Sherman, Vanity Fair

30 April 20
readersupportednews.org

Obsessed with impeachment and their enemies and worried about the stock market, the president and his son-in-law scapegoated HHS Secretary Alex Azar, and treated the coronavirus as mostly a political problem as it moved through the country.

On the afternoon of Thursday, March 19, Donald Trump sat in the Oval Office obsessing over the beaches in Florida. CNN footage of shirtless spring breakers packed onto the sand while the coronavirus pandemic raged sparked national outrage—and pressure on Trump to act. The next morning, New York governor Andrew Cuomo would announce strict stay-at-home orders for residents, but Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis refused to close his state’s beaches, a position even Florida’s Republican senator Rick Scott called reckless. “Lots of people were telling Trump to lean on Ron,” a Trump adviser said.

Trump’s view of the situation was complicated, though. For weeks, his top medical advisers, Dr. Deborah Birx and Dr. Anthony Fauci, had been hectoring him about the seriousness of the crisis and the necessity of swift action, testing, lockdowns. “We knew from the beginning...we were going to get cases in the United States,” Fauci told me.

“We knew we were in for a very serious problem.”

Sometimes, Trump listened. The disease was coming closer to his own circle—chief of staff Mark Meadows and communications director Stephanie Grisham were self-quarantining—and the number of cases in New York City had reached 4,000. But the substrate of his thinking hadn’t evolved, and it kept reappearing. He worried about the economy, which was crucial to his reelection. He vented to friends that the doctors were alarmist, and that the crisis was something Democrats and the media were doing to him. “Trump was obsessed with Pelosi, Schiff, the media, just obsessed. He would say, ‘They’re using it against me!’ recalled a Republican in frequent contact with the White House. “It was unhinged.”

Florida was a test case of his magical thinking about the novel coronavirus: That it was temporary, that warm weather would make it disappear. But eight Florida residents had already died from COVID-19 and more than 400 had been diagnosed.

“Given the elderly population, if that took off, it would be a nightmare,” a person close to Trump told me. At an adviser’s urging, Trump called DeSantis to tell him to shut down the beaches.

“Ron, what are you doing down there?” Trump said, according to a person briefed on the call.

“I can’t ban people from going on the beach,” DeSantis snapped, surprising Trump.

“These pictures look really bad to the rest of the country,” Trump said.

“Listen, we’re doing it the right way,” DeSantis said.

DeSantis’s intransigence backed Trump into a corner. The 41-year-old governor was a Trump protégé and a crucial ally in a must-win state. “Trump is worried about Florida, electorally,” said a Republican who spoke with Trump around this time. Trump did something he rarely does: He caved. He told DeSantis the beaches could stay open.

“I understand what you’re saying,” Trump said, and hung up.

It was inevitable that Health and Human Services secretary Alex Azar would become the West Wing COVID-19 scapegoat. An avuncular Yale educated lawyer with owlish glasses and a beard, Azar was not, as Trump liked to say, out of central casting. Equally bad, Azar was a “Bushie,” as Trump called Republicans who served in George W. Bush’s administration. Azar was briefed on a new and dangerous coronavirus sweeping the Chinese city of Wuhan by CDC director Robert Redfield on January 3—but he struggled to communicate this knowledge to the president.

At the time of the outbreak, Trump had soured on Azar, whom he blamed for his weak health care polling numbers. “Trump thought Azar was a disaster. He is definitely on the gangplank,” a person close to Trump told me. Azar wasn’t able to speak to Trump about the virus for two weeks, even though Trump called him during this period to scream that the White House’s ban on e-cigarettes, a response to a health crisis that he believed could help him politically, had become a drag on his poll numbers. “I never should have done this fucking vaping thing!” Trump told Azar on January 17, a person familiar with the call told me.

When Azar finally told Trump about the outbreak on the phone at Mar-a-Lago, on the night of Saturday, January 18, Trump cut him off and launched into another e-cigarette rant. “Trump jumped his shit about vaping,” a person briefed on the phone call told me.

Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, shared Trump’s view that the media and Democrats were hyping the crisis for political purposes. And for both of them, the biggest worry was how the response to the coronavirus might impact the health of the economy. According to sources, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, a fierce China hawk, and deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger, a former China-based Wall Street Journal reporter who’d covered the 2003 SARS pandemic, argued to officials in mid-January that the White House needed to shut down incoming flights from China.

Kushner pushed back. “Jared kept saying the stock market would go down, and Trump wouldn’t get reelected,” a Republican briefed on the internal debates said (a person close to Kushner denies this). Kushner’s position was supported by Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin and National Economic Council chief Larry Kudlow. Trump sided with them. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Trump minimized the threat in his first public comments. “It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control,” he told CNBC. (The White House and Treasury Department deny Mnuchin and Kudlow were against closing flights.)

When the coronavirus exploded out of China, Kushner was the second most powerful person in the West Wing, exerting influence over virtually every significant decision, from negotiating trade deals to 2020 campaign strategy to overseeing Trump’s impeachment defense. “Jared is running everything. He’s the de facto president of the United States,” a former White House official told me. The previous chief of staff John Kelly, who’d marginalized Kushner, was long gone, and Mick Mulvaney, a virtual lame duck by that point, let Kushner run free. “Jared treats Mick like the help,” a prominent Republican said.

Kushner’s princely arrogance had been a fixture in the West Wing since Trump’s inauguration. “The family has a degree of trust and protection that no one else enjoys,” the former West Wing official said. Kushner can appear mild-mannered, but, like his father-in-law, he seemed to relish the power he derived from crushing adversaries. After Trump’s acquittal, Kushner helped orchestrate a purge of national security officials that testified against the president. According to a source, Kushner provided the White House’s 29-year-old personnel director, John McEntee, with a list of names to be fired. ("In no way shape or form did Jared provide a list to Johnny McEntee on people to be fired," a source familiar with the matter said).

During his time in the West Wing, Kushner had become hardened to a degree that was sometimes shocking. The days of selling the notion that he and Ivanka were moderating forces were long gone—combat was everything. A New York business executive recalled a meeting with Kushner at the White House last fall. “I told Jared that if Trump won a second term, he wouldn’t have to worry about running again and you can really help people. Jared just looked at me and said, ‘I don’t care about any of that.’”

The executive came away shaken. “I wanted to tell Jared you don’t say that part out loud, even in private,” he later said. (A source close to Kushner says he has no recollection of making the comment.)

Kushner had an enemies list as long as Trump’s, and at times it played into his response to the crisis. He scoffed when his old nemesis, Steve Bannon, launched a podcast called War Room: Pandemic in January. “Steve’s a dead man. Last he was seen, he was standing on the side of the FDR Drive with the squeegee guys,” Kushner told a Republican around this time.

Kushner also had a famously unshakable belief in his own judgment. According to sources, Trump’s former Homeland Security adviser Tom Bossert told Kushner in early March that the White House needed to step up its coronavirus response.

“Tom tried sounding the alarm with Jared,” said a person who spoke to Bossert at the time. (Bossert denies this.) Kushner, according to the person, dismissed Bossert’s concerns. Bossert later published his advice in a Washington Post op-ed.

“Tom was hammering him: ‘You have to get on this.’ No one listened, so he wrote the op-ed,” a former West Wing official said. Bossert later told people that Kushner icily told him the op-ed was a mistake. (Bossert denies this.)

Navarro and Pottinger finally convinced Trump to stop the flights when they showed him that more than 400,000 people had entered the U.S. from China since early January. “Trump was stunned by the sheer scale,” a Republican briefed on the meeting told me. “Navarro banged on the table enough to get the flights stopped.” On January 31, Trump barred travel from China. Even then, it was a half measure: the ban only applied to non-Americans who had traveled to China in the previous 14 days. American citizens could come and go.

Trump saw this as the end of the story—he’d taken strong public action, built his China Wall. Now, he looked forward to hitting the campaign trail and trumpeting the booming stock market. “He just wanted to hold rallies and watch television,” a former West Wing official said. “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China,” Trump told Sean Hannity during a pre–Super Bowl interview on February 2. He held a half dozen rallies over the next month.

But it was just the beginning.

On February 5, the Republican-controlled Senate acquitted Trump without hearing from a single witness. He was gleeful, and immediately turned his attention to his enemies. “Trump’s playbook is simple,” said a former White House official. “Go after people who crossed him during impeachment.” Forty-eight hours after the verdict, Trump launched his purge of career officials who testified in the House, including Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, a decorated Iraq War veteran and, for good measure, his twin brother, who also worked in the government.

Focused on his purge and his reelection, Trump mostly told himself a happy story about the virus, cherry-picking the most optimistic projections. He assured friends at Mar-a-Lago that Chinese president Xi Jinping promised him the outbreak would die out in warmer weather. “He said Xi told him it would all be over in April,” a Republican who spoke with Trump told me. At a rally in New Hampshire on February 10, Trump declared: “We only have 11 cases and they are all getting better.”

They weren’t. On February 23, the CDC documented the first case of person-to-person transmission in California. “Once you had community spread, we realized all bets are off,” Fauci later told me. Trump tweeted on February 24: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA….Stock Market starting to look very good to me!” The market plunged nearly 900 points the next day. Trump called Azar and screamed that the CDC was alarming people. “It’s a little bit like the flu,” Trump assured reporters at the White House.

The same day, Trump finally pushed Azar aside and put vice president Mike Pence in charge of the White House’s coronavirus task force. According to a source, Trump had considered other candidates—former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, Birx, and former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb—but he told people that bringing in a credentialed outsider would signal a larger concern about the virus. 

“It’s going to make the issue bigger than it needs to be,” he said to an adviser. He also knew that Pence could be controlled. “Trump trusts Pence almost more than anyone,” a former White House official said. In the West Wing, Trump often belittles Pence in front of others. “Pence lives in mortal fear of being booted off the ticket. Trump constantly reminds Mike that he almost didn’t choose him,” a Republican that heard Trump make the comments told me.

Trump viewed the media as the force most toxic to his administration, and he sometimes took this belief to paranoid lengths. In early March, Trump told aides that journalists hated him so much they would try to contract coronavirus on purpose to give it to him on Air Force One, a person close to the administration told me. “This is full-blown, pathological, paranoid-level delusion,” a former West Wing official said. Trump claimed CNN and MSNBC were trying to drive down the stock market. “I want to get Comcast!” he told a prominent Republican. “He wants Justice to open investigations of the media for market manipulation,” the person close to the administration told me.

Trump’s role as crisis pitchman became paramount, and any glitches sent him over the edge. A source said Trump was furious about his appearance during a Fox News town hall on March 5. “Trump said afterwards that the lighting was bad and he had a brown spot on his face,” a source briefed on the conversation said. “He said, ‘I look terrible! We need Bill Shine back in here. Bill would never allow this.’”

His press conference at the CDC on March 6 was his first full-scale attempt at media ownership of the crisis, and it will be remembered as a Trumpian classic, heavy on braggadocio, an infomercial with himself as the product. “I like this stuff. I really get it,” Trump told reporters, his face partly hidden under a red “Keep America Great” hat. “People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors say, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should’ve done that instead of running for president.”

When reviews, understandably, were not good, he complained that White House officials weren’t defending him. “He was very frustrated he doesn’t have a good team around him,” a former White House official said. Trump vented to aides about Mnuchin, whom he blamed for encouraging him to pick Jerome Powell, a frequent Trump target, as chairman of the Federal Reserve. “Steve picked Powell and Powell is trying to screw me!” Trump said, according to a Republican who overheard the comments. Sources said Trump fumed over Larry Kudlow’s refusal to hold an on-camera press briefing to talk up the markets. “Larry didn’t want to have to take questions about coronavirus,” a person close to Kudlow told me. “Larry’s not a doctor. How can he answer questions about something he doesn’t know?”

Fox News, as always, was Trump’s safe place. The network’s hosts had been following his cues, aggressively amplifying claims that COVID-19 posed little danger. “It’s actually the safest time to fly,” Fox & Friends host Ainsley Earhardt told viewers in early March, a clip that came to symbolize the network’s cavalier approach to the pandemic. Some inside Fox feared this denialism could get viewers killed and expose the network to massive legal liability. “If you want to get on the air, you had to say crazy shit about the virus,” one Fox staffer told me.

Tucker Carlson was an important exception. Partly for ideological reasons—China bashing is a running story line on his show—Carlson covered the epidemic early. “Every day now brings thousands of new cases and dozens of new deaths in China.... We should be vigilant as well. We have infections already in this country,” he warned viewers on February 4.

Carlson privately told friends that Trump failed to grasp the scale of the crisis. Normally, when Carlson has advice for the White House, he says it on television. But after Trump’s rambling CDC press conference on March 6, Carlson realized the situation was an emergency and he needed to confront Trump in person.

The following afternoon, Carlson drove from his Florida home to Mar-a-Lago—surprisingly his first visit—and was astonished by what he found. The club that weekend was an alternate reality where coronavirus didn’t seem to exist. Down by the pool, Kimberly Guilfoyle was hosting a cocktail party for a hundred friends to kick off her lavish 51st birthday celebration. The guest list included much of Trumpworld’s elite, including Guilfoyle’s boyfriend Don Jr., Eric and Lara Trump, Lindsey Graham, Rudy Giuliani and Pence—even Tiffany Trump flew in for the weekend. Later that night, Guilfoyle break-danced. The president sang happy birthday after he dined on the patio shoulder-to-shoulder with Ivanka and Kushner and Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s delegation.

Carlson met with Trump before Guilfoyle’s party got going. He didn’t expect to get much face time. The conversation lasted two hours. Carlson told Trump that COVID-19 posed an existential threat to the country—and his reelection—unless the White House took aggressive steps to slow the spread. “I said exactly what I’ve said on TV, which is this could be really bad,” Carlson later told Vanity Fair’s Joe Hagan. “My view [was] that we may have missed the point where we can control it.” Carlson’s message seemed to puncture Trump’s bubble. “[Trump] is just now waking up to the fact that this is bad, and he doesn’t know how to respond,” a Republican told me around this time.

What Trump didn’t know then was that coronavirus was spreading unchecked around Mar-a-Lago. Bolsonaro’s press secretary later tested positive and potentially seeded a cluster. He’d shaken hands with Trump and Pence and attended Guilfoyle’s party (more than a dozen members of the Brazilian delegation eventually came down with COVID-19). Guilfoyle’s friend, Republican fundraiser Caroline Wren, developed suspicious symptoms, a source told me. “Kimberly spent all week with Caroline,” the source said. (A spokesperson for the Trump campaign said Wren tested negative.) RNC chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel also came down with symptoms after attending a donor retreat at Mar-a-Lago.

The same weekend, news broke that an attendee of CPAC, the conservative activist conference, tested positive for coronavirus, and that Trump had potentially been exposed. Fauci and other officials wanted Trump to announce social-distancing guidelines and other mitigation strategies. But Trump was still pushing back. He refused to get tested and insisted that he would continue to hold rallies. “He is going to resist until the very last minute,” a former West Wing official told me in early March. “He may take suggestions to stop shaking hands, but in terms of shutting stuff down, his position is: ‘No, I’m not going to do it.’”

On March 11, the World Health Organization declared coronavirus a global pandemic, and Trump agreed to broadcast an Oval Office address to the nation. But even then, Kushner advised Trump to tread lightly. One source briefed on the internal conversations said Kushner told Trump not to declare a national emergency during the address because “it would tank the markets.” The markets cratered anyway, and Trump announced the national emergency later in the week. “They had to clean that up on Friday,” the source said. (A person close to Kushner denies this version of events.)

Even as the crisis was tearing through New York, with emerging problems in Louisiana, Michigan, and Illinois, Trump obsessed over the future, fixating on the fall and his reelection. He took time to call NFL owners and urge them not to preemptively cancel football season. “Trump begged them not to cancel,” said a source briefed on the call.

Increasingly, Kushner was in control of Trump’s response. Looking to keep him close, Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short recruited Kushner to officially join the coronavirus task force on March 12. “Pence people look at Jared apprehensively. Pence treats Jared as a peer,” said Sam Nunberg, the former Trump aide.

Kushner quickly assembled a shadow network of coronavirus advisers that became more powerful than Pence’s official team. He even worked on Shabbat, a source who spoke with him on a Saturday said. (A person close to Kushner says working on Shabbat is accepted for Orthodox Jews if it’s “to save someone’s life.”) “On balance, Pence wanted Jared involved because it guarantees Trump is focused,” an executive who Kushner consulted recalled.

Azar was still the necessary scapegoat. Kushner blamed him for the criticism Trump received about the delays in testing, according to a person in frequent touch with the West Wing. “This was a total mess,” Kushner told people when he got involved. Kushner had no medical experience, but that didn’t seem to matter. “To be honest, when I got involved, I was a little intimidated. But I know how to make this government run now,” Kushner said, according to a source. “The arrogance was on full display.”

Kushner advocated for the iconoclastic public-private approach he had used for his Mideast peace plan. He reached out to business leaders like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, according to a source. With bravado only partly grounded in reality, he promised Trump that Google was rolling out a testing website. He also made a point of bypassing normal channels, phoning Wall Street executives and asking for advice on how to help New York, people briefed on the conversation said.

A former West Wing official said Kushner’s involvement wrought chaos: business leaders wanting to contribute masks or ventilators didn’t know who in government to call. According to two sources, Kushner told Trump about experimental treatments he’d learned of from executives in Silicon Valley. “Jared is bringing conspiracy theories to Trump about potential treatments,” a Republican briefed on the conversations told me. (A person close to Kushner said he brought COVID testing ideas to Trump.) Trump could be a receptive audience. Another former West Wing official told me: “Trump is like an 11-year-old boy waiting for the fairy godmother to bring him a magic pill.”

Kushner encouraged Trump to push back against Cuomo after the New York governor gave an emotional press conference during which he said New York was short 30,000 ventilators. In a White House meeting, 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. Trump later echoed him, telling Sean Hannity in an interview, “I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators.”

By early April, Trump began to realize that he was losing the messaging war. Cuomo’s morning press briefings, which had become appointment television for many, were a particular goad. “He’s said Cuomo looks good,” said a Republican briefed on internal conversations. Trump counterprogrammed with his own evening press conferences.

As a former West Wing official put it, “Trump wants to play press secretary.” He prepared each day with Hope Hicks, who returned to the White House after a brief stint working for Fox Corp, nominally working for Jared Kushner. A source said she counseled him on how to look presidential. But the briefings could stretch to Soviet lengths, often over two hours, and they lurched wildly in tone.

With the media as a captive audience, Trump often couldn’t resist shifting into rally mode. One day, he lit into NBC News reporter Peter Alexander when Alexander asked what Trump would say to Americans who are scared about the crisis. The confrontation energized Trump, according to a Republican who spoke to him afterward. “He was in the Oval Office feeling positive,” the source said.

Fauci had become a costar and a straight-man foil, something that Trump has never been able to stand. Their relationship was badly strained after Fauci gave a series of candid interviews and appeared to face palm as Trump spoke at a press conference. 

“I made Fauci a star. The least he could do is give me a little credit,” Trump complained to a friend. Republicans became so worried that Trump would fire Fauci that they looked for any means to prevent it. One Wall Street executive lobbied House minority leader Kevin McCarthy to tell Trump the Dow would implode if he canned Fauci. “The markets follow Fauci,” the executive told me. (“Has it been stressful? Uh, yeah,” Fauci told me when I asked him about working for Trump. “This is a very, very stressful situation for everybody, including me.”)

Inside the West Wing, the blame game kicked into high gear. “This is going to be 9/11 and Pearl Harbor combined. People are going to be covering their asses for years,” a former West Wing official told me. A front page New York Times piece on April 11 was widely seen as an effort by Azar’s camp to push back on Trump and Kushner. After the piece ran, Trump installed Michael Caputo, a loyalist and close Roger Stone friend, to be Health and Human Services spokesman.

Even Kushner wasn’t insulated. Trump was enraged that Kushner had oversold Google’s coronavirus testing website and that he’d gotten slammed in the press for promoting an essentially phantom product. “Jared told Trump that Google was doing an entire website that would be up in 72 hours and had 1,100 people working on it 24/7.

That’s just a lie,” the source briefed on the internal conversations told me. (A White House official responded: “This is just another false story focused on rumors about palace intrigue instead of the actual aggressive measures President Trump has implemented to keep the American people safe and healthy.”)

The virus was a threat Trump couldn’t bully, and his record of inaction something he couldn’t erase. Later in April, he tried to change the subject, announcing an immigration ban, with little detail about how it would work. Beaches in Florida, bowling alleys and nail salons in Georgia were reopened—magical thinking had reemerged. But beneath the bluster was a darker reality. “He’s paralyzed,” a former official said. Trump reversed course and criticized Georgia’s move to reopen. “This is not what [Trump] likes to do,” added a former West Wing official. “There’s no boogeyman he can attack.”

Trump clung to hope. “The economy will be back in two months, just wait,” he told a friend. But the fall was still a long way away. “If I have any rallies at all, they won’t be until the convention,” he told another friend in mid-March.

The thought seemed to depress him. “The campaign doesn’t matter anymore,” he recently told the friend. “What I do now will determine if I get reelected.”

“To be honest, when I got involved, I was a little intimidated. But I know how to make this government run now,” Kushner said, according to a source. “The arrogance was on full display.”