What has gone wrong ? I interviewed dozens of people, including outsiders who Trump consults regularly, former senior advisers, World Health Organization officials, leading scientists and diplomats, and figures inside the White House. Some spoke off the record.
Again and again, the story that emerged is of a president who ignored increasingly urgent intelligence warnings from January, dismisses anyone who claims to know more than him and trusts no one outside a tiny coterie, led by his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner ā the property developer who Trump has empowered to sideline the best-funded disaster response bureaucracy in the world.
People often observed during Trumpās first three years that he had yet to be tested in a true crisis. Covid-19 is way bigger than that. āTrumpās handling of the pandemic at home and abroad has exposed more painfully than anything since he took office the meaning of America First,ā says William Burns, who was the most senior US diplomat, and is now head of the Carnegie Endowment.
āAmerica is first in the world in deaths, first in the world in infections and we stand out as an emblem of global incompetence. The damage to Americaās influence and reputation will be very hard to undo.ā
The psychology behind Trumpās inaction on Covid-19 was on display that afternoon at the CDC. The unemployment number had come out that morning. The US had added 273,000 jobs in February, bringing the jobless rate down to a near record low of 3.5 per cent. Trumpās re-election chances were looking 50:50 or better. The previous Saturday, Joe Biden had won the South Carolina primary. But the Democratic contest still seemed to have miles to go. Nothing could be allowed to frighten the Dow Jones.
Any signal that the US was bracing for a pandemic ā including taking actual steps to prepare for it ā was discouraged.
āJared [Kushner] had been arguing that testing too many people, or ordering too many ventilators, would spook the markets and so we just shouldnāt do it,ā says a Trump confidant who speaks to the president frequently. āThat advice worked far more powerfully on him than what the scientists were saying. He thinks they always exaggerate.ā
Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank, who talks regularly to Trump and is a campaign adviser, says the mood was borderline ecstatic in early March. āThe economy was just steaming along, the stock market was firing on all cylinders and that jobs report was fantastic,ā says Moore. āIt was almost too perfect. Nobody expected this virus. It hit us like a meteor or a terrorist attack.ā
People in Trumpās orbit are fond of comparing coronavirus to the 9/11 attacks. George W Bush missed red flags in the build-up to al-Qaedaās Twin Towers attacks. But he was only once explicitly warned of a possible plot a few weeks before it happened. āAll right, youāve covered your ass,ā Bush reportedly told the briefer.
At some point, Congress is likely to establish a body like the 9/11 Commission to investigate Trumpās handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. The inquiry would find that Trump was warned countless times of the epidemic threat in his presidential daily briefings, by federal scientists, the health secretary Alex Azar, Peter Navarro, his trade adviser, Matt Pottinger, his Asia adviser, by business friends and the world at large. Any report would probably conclude that tens of thousands of deaths could have been prevented ā even now as Trump pushes to āliberateā states from lockdown.
āIt is as though we knew for a fact that 9/11 was going to happen for months, did nothing to prepare for it and then shrugged a few days later and said, āOh well, thereās not much we can do about it,āā says Gregg Gonsalves, a public health scholar at Yale University. āTrump could have prevented mass deaths and he didnāt.ā
Demonstrators gather in Olympia, Washington to protest against the stateās stay-at-home orders. Trump adviser Stephen Moore says he told the president āthis lockdown is causing more deaths and misery than the disease itselfā
In fairness, other democracies, notably the UK, Italy and Spain, also wasted time failing to prepare for the approaching onslaught. Whoever was Americaās president might have been equally ill-served by Washington infighting.
The CDC has been plagued by mishap and error throughout the crisis. The agency spent weeks trying to develop a jinxed test when it could simply have imported WHO-approved kits from Germany, which has been making them since late January. āThe CDC has been missing in action,ā says a former senior adviser in the Trump White House. āBecause of the CDCās errors, we did not have a true picture of the spread of the disease.ā
Here again, though, Trumpās stamp is clear. It was Trump who chose Robert Redfield to head the CDC in spite of widespread warnings about the former military officerās controversial record. Redfield led the Pentagonās response to HIV-Aids in the 1980s. It involved isolating suspected soldiers in so-called HIV Hotels. Many who tested positive were dishonourably discharged. Some committed suicide.
A devout catholic, Redfield saw Aids as the product of an immoral society. For many years, he championed a much-hyped remedy that was discredited in tests. That debacle led to his removal from the job in 1994.
Trump and Robert Redfield at a daily briefing of the coronavirus task force at the White House. Trump chose Redfield to head the CDC despite of widespread warnings about the former military officerās controversial record on HIV-Aids Ā© Drew Angerer/Getty Images
āRedfield is about the worst person you could think of to be heading the CDC at this time,ā says Laurie Garrett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist who has reported on epidemics. āHe lets his prejudices interfere with the science, which you cannot afford during a pandemic.ā
One of the CDCās constraints was to insist on developing its own test rather than import a foreign one. Dr Anthony Fauci ā the infectious disease expert and now household name ā is widely known to loathe Redfield, and vice versa. That meant the CDC and Fauciās National Institutes of Health were not on the same page. āThe last thing you need is scientists fighting with each other in the middle of an epidemic,ā says Dr Kenneth Bernard, who set up a previous White House pandemic unit in 2004, which was scrapped under Barack Obama and later revived after Ebola struck in 2014.
The scarcity of kits meant that the scientists lacked a picture of Americaās rapidly spreading infections. The CDC was forced to ration tests to āpersons under investigationā ā people who had come within 6ft of someone who had either visited China or been infected with Covid-19 in the previous 14 days. Most were denied. Few could prove that they had met either criterion. This was at a time when several countries, notably Germany, Taiwan and South Korea, gave access to on-the-spot tests, including at drive-through centres ā an option most Americans still lack.
I think heās lying but this is all related to his valet that tested positive last week.
