by Bob Woodward
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Trump attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in late January, an exclusive gathering of world and financial leaders. The first reported coronavirus case in the U.S. had just been identified. “It’s one person coming in from China. We have it under control. It’s going to be just fine,” Trump said, making his first public comment on the coronavirus during an interview in Davos. “We think it is going to be handled very well,” he said during a separate interview. “We’ve already handled it very well.”
Trump called me January 22, just after 9:00 p.m.
“I just got back” from Davos, he said. “I literally just landed.” Trump’s voice boomed over the speakerphone.
I asked about his strategy for dealing with Chinese president Xi Jinping. He had signed a trade deal with China a week earlier.
“Well, first of all, his personality is incredible,” Trump said. “His strength, his mental and physical strength, is great. He’s very, very smart. He’s very cunning. I get along with him fantastically well.” He said they’d had some “rough patches” during the trade talks. “Outside of religion, trade is the most dangerous thing there is.” Interesting sociology, I thought.
Trump believed China had originally planned to wait until after the November 2020 election to agree to a trade deal. “China went out, hired the best pollsters in the country, and they said Trump’s going to win in a landslide,” he claimed. “They said, might as well get it over with.”
He thought his relationship with Xi had been “strained very much during the deal. We heard China—you know, China’s had the worst year they’ve had in 67 years.” He indicated that businesses had shifted away from China during the trade war. “I had all the cards,” he said. The United States’ growth had gone up and China’s had gone down. “So we’re now the number-one country by far.” After the trade deal, Trump said, “our country is rocking now like it hasn’t rocked.”
I asked Trump about his decision making in foreign policy. He told me he was working with the Turkish leader on the war in Syria.
“I get along very well with Erdogan, even though you’re not supposed to because everyone says ‘What a horrible guy,’ ” Trump said. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a repressive leader with a terrible record on human rights. “But for me it works out good. It’s funny, the relationships I have, the tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them. You know? Explain that to me someday, okay?”
That might not be difficult, I thought, but I didn’t say anything.
“But maybe it’s not a bad thing,” he continued. “The easy ones are the ones I maybe don’t like as much or don’t get along with as much.”
Trump told me he had recently called Roberto Azevêdo, the head of the World Trade Organization, which Trump believed had been “ripping us off like crazy for 25, 30 years.” In early December, the United States had blocked the appointment of judges to an appeals panel and hobbled the WTO’s ability to resolve trade disputes between nations.
On the call Trump said, “Roberto, you treat us very badly. The United States is considered this very wealthy place, and China is considered a developing nation, and India’s a developing nation. If you’re a developing nation, you get things that nobody else will get. We’re going to be a developing nation.” When Azevêdo protested, Trump said, “Here’s what I’m doing: I’m pulling out of the World Trade Organization.”
Azevêdo announced his early resignation from the WTO in May amid the ongoing dispute and the coronavirus pandemic.
The president brought up the European Union, which he felt had also been “ripping us off for years” and been “formed to screw the United States.” Trump said he had been waiting to take on the European Union until his trade deals with China, Mexico and Canada were done. “I don’t want to be fighting every country in the world at the same time.”
Trump grew exercised when I tried to break up his litany of trade achievements and grievances—which we covered nearly every time we spoke—with more questions about foreign policy.
“No, no, I made all these deals but nobody wants to talk about them!” he exclaimed. He said the media preferred to focus on “the impeachment horseshit.” Then he said he hoped my wife Elsa wasn’t listening, “because I don’t want to have her hear. Because I know her ears must be very beautiful and very—she doesn’t hear bad language.”
Trump said the news covered “the impeachment thing 95, 96 percent of the time. They talk about the economy less than one percent, and it’s the greatest economy in the history of the country. So I have to talk about them myself, Bob.”
While the economy was doing very well, it was not the greatest in the history of the country.
Trump told me about a dinner he’d hosted. Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon who purchased The Washington Post in 2013, had attended. He said he’d pulled Bezos aside, or possibly called him the next day, and said, “Jeff, you don’t have to treat me good. But just treat me fairly. When I do something great, say it’s great. When I do something good, say it’s good. And when I do something bad, knock the hell out of me.”
Oh, I never get involved, Bezos had said, according to Trump. He played no role in The Washington Post’s news coverage of Trump or anything else.
“What do you mean you don’t get involved?” Trump said. You’re losing millions a year on the newspaper. “Of course you get involved.”
The Post was not losing money and has apparently been a profitable business under Bezos’s ownership.
Bezos had insisted he never got involved.
I had known Bezos for more than 20 years and worked at the Post for 49 years. I told Trump that I believed that was true. There was an iron curtain between the newsroom and ownership.
“Hard to believe,” Trump said. “If I really knew it was true, I’d treat him much differently. Because I haven’t been very nice to him, you know.” The Washington Post’s strong independence from Bezos seemed to genuinely strain credulity for Trump. “It’s just hard for me. Maybe it’s a different personality. But it’s hard for me to believe.”
After a few minutes, we returned to the subject of the newspaper. “The people at the Post are upset about the Khashoggi killing,” I said, referring to Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post contributing columnist who had been critical of the Saudi royal family and was murdered and dismembered in Istanbul in 2018. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, known colloquially as MBS, was widely and credibly believed to have ordered the killing. “That is one of the most gruesome things,” I said. “You yourself have said.”
“Yeah, but Iran is killing 36 people a day, so—” Trump said.
I pressed him on MBS’s role in the Khashoggi killing. My reporting showed that Trump had told others about the crown prince. “I saved his ass,” Trump had said after the U.S. outcry over Khashoggi’s murder, and “I was able to get Congress to leave him alone. I was able to get them to stop.” He’d sarcastically told members of Congress, “Let them trade with Russia instead. Let them buy a thousand planes from Russia instead of the United States. Let them go to China and buy all of their military equipment instead of the United States. Fellas, you’ve got to be smart.”
In May 2019, Trump had used his emergency authority to bypass the objections of Congress and sell the Saudis $8 billion in arms.
Now, Trump said, “Well, I understand what you’re saying, and I’ve gotten involved very much. I know everything about the whole situation.” He said Saudi Arabia spent hundreds of billions in the United States and was responsible for millions of jobs. Of MBS, Trump said, “He will always say that he didn’t do it. He says that to everybody, and frankly I’m happy that he says that. But he will say that to you, he will say that to Congress, and he will say that to everybody. He’s never said he did it.”
“Do you believe that he did it?” I asked.
“No, he says that he didn’t do it.”
“I know, but do you really believe—”
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��He says very strongly that he didn’t do it,” Trump said. “Bob, they spent $400 billion over a fairly short period of time.”
Trump was referring, as he often did, to the deals struck in advance of his trip to Saudi Arabia in 2017. In a fact-check, the Associated Press wrote, “Actual orders under the arms deal are far smaller, and neither country has announced nor substantiated Trump’s repeated assertion that the Saudis are poised to inject $450 billion overall into the U.S. economy.”
“And you know, they’re in the Middle East,” Trump went on. Saudi Arabia was an important ally. “You know, they’re big. Because of their religious monuments, you know, they have the real power. They have the oil, but they also have the great monuments for religion. You know that, right? For that religion.”
“Yes,” I said. “All those countries are vulnerable unless we provide protection.”
“They wouldn’t last a week if we’re not there, and they know it.”
Later in the interview Trump again returned to The Washington Post. “If you look at all the things we’ve got completed now, it’s incredible,” Trump said, “including, by the way, making The New York Times and Washington Post and cable television successful. Because they were all going down the tubes. But they’ll be gone. When I leave, they’re all going down. They’re going to be gone.”
“I hope that’s not the case,” I said. Then Trump and I spoke at the same time. “Because I think it’s really important that we have the First Amendment,” I said. “You know that.”
“Well, I hope so, but it’s going to be the case,” Trump said. He wondered aloud which paper was “more dishonest,” The Washington Post or The New York Times. “Hard to believe that Jeff Bezos is not controlling what’s happening.” It was clear that if Trump had owned a newspaper, he would be actively involved.
Trump said he had just “signed my 187th federal judge,” and reminded me of his two Supreme Court appointments. “When I get out, I’ll probably have more than 50 percent of the federal judges in the country appointed under Trump,” he bragged. “The only one that has a better percentage is George Washington, because he appointed 100 percent.”
Although Trump has repeated this claim often, it is not factual. Among recent presidents, Clinton, Carter and Nixon had each filled a greater percentage of federal judgeships by late January of the fourth year of their first term. He was also not alone in appointing two Supreme Court justices in his first term—Presidents Obama, Clinton and George H. W. Bush had also done so.
I said my reporting showed that Trump had nominated some judges that Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and other Republicans had rejected.
“Yeah,” Trump said. “When they don’t like them, I don’t put them in.” He added, “In some cases they’re not conservative or they don’t believe or they came out with a couple of bad decisions or something.”
“Graham is worried that the judiciary is going to become too partisan,” I said. “Do you worry about that?”
“Well, it depends,” Trump said. “Yeah, it’s very partisan right now, basically. It’s always a party vote. I mean, look, the whole country right now is a partisan vote.”
Toward the end of the interview, Trump seized on an offhand mention I’d made of President Obama. “Ninety percent of the things he’s done, I’ve taken apart,” Trump said.
According to a tally kept by The Washington Post, by January 20, 2018, Trump had issued 17 executive actions and the administration had made 96 cabinet-level agency decisions that would “review, revoke and overwrite key parts of his predecessor’s domestic legacy.” Obama issued 276 executive orders over his eight years in office.
Our interview had lasted a little over half an hour, a freewheeling, late-night tour of the world according to Trump. The president wanted to project high spirits. He believed he had won his trade war with China and proclaimed victory for the American economy in Davos. He told me to come in for another interview soon.
“We’ll see if we can actually get a fair book,” he said.
* * *
The next day, January 23, in the midst of Trump’s impeachment, Chinese health authorities locked down Wuhan and several nearby cities, suspending outbound flights, trains and buses and locking down more than 35 million people.
At the White House that day, halfway through the Top Secret President’s Daily Brief in the Oval Office, chief briefer Beth Sanner told President Trump at that point the intelligence community had a pretty benign take on the coronavirus.
“Just like the flu,” Sanner said in terms of severity. “We don’t think it’s as deadly as SARS.” We do not believe this is going to be a global pandemic, she said.
The PDB was supposed to contain not only the most classified and sensitive intelligence but the most relevant so the president would be tipped off to a pending crisis. O’Brien and Pottinger were disappointed in the intelligence community, and the presentation only reinforced their determination to penetrate what they were sure was a Chinese cover-up.
Though there would later be news reports that the written version of the PDB contained warnings about the virus, these stories did not cite specifics. It was also well established by this time that Trump did not read the PDB but relied on oral presentations.
When Pottinger saw the news reports he scratched his head and went back and reviewed all the intelligence reports, finding nothing. “Complete fucking bullshit,” he said. “What intel? There was none.”
* * *
The virus now appeared to be spreading like crazy. On January 24, Chinese scientists finally published a report in The Lancet, perhaps the world’s most respected medical journal, stating “evidence so far indicates human transmission” of the coronavirus.
Alex Azar, the secretary of Health and Human Services, called his counterpart, Ma Xiaowei, the Chinese health minister the morning of January 27. Pottinger was on the call. Nearly a month had passed since the first reports from China.
Can we send our guys in? Azar asked. Let us do it. We’ve got experts. We can provide support. We can help. Let’s share samples. World Health Organization rules required that samples be shared. Just you say it, they’re ready to go. Their bags are packed.
Thank you very much, said Ma. It’s great to hear from you. We’ll look at it.
No answer followed. Azar was angry, but avoided any open disagreement and tweeted that he “conveyed our appreciation for China’s efforts.”
* * *
A new impeachment sensation appeared that day with a report in The New York Times about former national security adviser John Bolton’s unpublished book manuscript, The Room Where It Happened. Bolton, in what the Times described an “explosive account,” wrote that Trump told him that he wanted $391 million in security aid to Ukraine frozen until the Bidens were investigated—the subject of the impeachment.
While the media was riveted by the Bolton bombshell, the virus alarm bells were going off more intensely than ever for Pottinger, who had stepped up his efforts to gather information from his own medical and political sources in China.
The Chinese were effectively saying we don’t want our people getting together with yours. We want to keep them separate. We do not want collaboration. As the case numbers escalated in Wuhan, Pottinger noted the Chinese were increasing information barriers and trying to keep U.S. reporters out of Wuhan. The few who slipped in were put in hotel rooms and told not to leave. Others were later expelled. Pottinger concluded the Chinese were more aggressive with expulsions than the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. All signs were pointing to an effort to hide something.
Even before the virus crisis, O’Brien and Pottinger believed China represented the greatest and most fundamental existential national security threat to the United States.
“They would love world domination,” O’Brien said during a private, closed-door West Wing briefing December 20, 2019. “Be the premier power in the world. There’s no question about it.”
“No doubt about it,” Pottinger said. Under President Xi “the ideology is now front and center again in a way it hasn’t been since Mao.”
Earlier O’Brien and Pottinger had aggressively argued against allowing the Chinese firm Huawei, the largest telecommunications equipment manufacturer in the world, into U.S. markets. O’Brien was convinced that Huawei wanted to use its fifth generation (5G) wireless network eventually to monitor every citizen in the world. It was another major national security threat to the United States. O’Brien said, “Backdoor your medical records, your social media posts, your emails, your financial records. Personal, private data on every American. Micro-target you based on your deepest fears.”
“Every member of Congress,” Pottinger said.
With the ground reports out of Wuhan showing the new virus spreading quickly, O’Brien knew the Chinese were going to try to get out of Dodge. The mayor of Wuhan had acknowledged as much on January 26, saying five million people had left the city in the week before the Chinese government locked it down.
The Chinese were wealthier than they had been 10 or 20 years ago in prior pandemics, O’Brien knew, but their health care system was still weak and overburdened. It was inevitable they would try to flee to the West, to the United States or Europe, to avoid the virus or find better treatment and hospitals.
Already, all across China, streets and highways were empty, shops and schools closed. Public transit was shut. An increasing number of countries had closed their borders to visitors who had been to China.
The United States, however, was still open to Chinese travel.
Something awful and dangerous was happening before their eyes, Pottinger insisted to O’Brien.
So at Trump’s next PDB, January 28, O’Brien issued his declaration that the virus would be “the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency,” and Pottinger backed him up.I
The next day, the White House announced the creation of a Coronavirus Task Force. Press secretary Stephanie Grisham said in a written statement: “The risk of infection for all Americans remains low, and all agencies are working aggressively to monitor this continuously evolving situation and to keep the public informed.”
