Rage

by Bob Woodward

  He was blowing off both me and the list.

  Elsa, my wife, was in the room during the call. At times I raised my voice in order to be able to complete a question or press the president to answer. At one point, she told me to stop yelling. She felt my list of 14 points sounded too much like I was telling him what to do. Others, I am sure, would agree. The list represented what I had found from my reporting, as I told him several times. If I was going to write about the list—and I was sure I would—I thought it only fair to ask him about it.

  I hung up, feeling distressed. Trump never did seem willing to fully mobilize the federal government and continually seemed to push problems off on the states. There was no real management theory of the case or how to organize a massive enterprise to deal with one of the most complex emergencies the United States had ever faced. Beyond being a reporter, I was worried for the country.

  * * *

  That same evening, Lindsey Graham spoke with Trump in a phone conversation of about 25 minutes. Graham had talked repeatedly with the president during the crisis and worried that Trump didn’t want to own the coronavirus problem.

  “He’s got one foot in and one foot out,” Graham said, describing the call afterward. “He wants to be a wartime president, but he doesn’t want to own any more than he has to own.”

  Graham told Trump complaints from people about unemployment benefits were a state problem and not his fault, but said, “I think it’s your job to fix problems, even if it’s not your fault.”

  The real flaw, Graham said, is testing. He had talked to Fauci. “Dr. Fauci said there’s 25 to 50 percent of the population with it that don’t even know they have it,” he said—referring to the percentage of infected people who don’t have symptoms but can spread the virus to others, not the overall U.S. population. “The only way you’re ever going to find out is to test. If you don’t, you’ll reignite the virus.”

  Graham said he told the president, “You need a plan. You need to explain to the country, we’re not helpless against the virus. Here’s the game plan to beat the virus.

  “You need theater commanders like you’ve got in Iraq or in Afghanistan. Somebody in charge of testing. Somebody in charge of vaccines. You need a Petraeus to regain your footing. You’ve lost the momentum. You need a surge. Testing is the biggest flaw we have.”

  While Trump’s job approval rating had reached the highest level of his presidency the week of this interview—about 47 percent in an average of national polls—it was beginning a downward slide as the weeks of the crisis drew on. “You need to peak in October,” Graham told Trump. “You need to have the economy showing signs of life. A vaccine on the horizon. Drug therapies that work.”

  Graham said Biden would be “a rough opponent, but your opponent’s the coronavirus.”

  “That’s probably true,” Trump answered.

  “It is, Mr. President. If you fuck it up, there’s nothing you can do to get reelected. If you seem to, you know, manage it well, you’re pretty much unbeatable. You keep the body count down, people will see you as somebody that was successful.”

  As close as he was to the president, Graham felt it was hard to penetrate Trump World and find out who had influence with him. But Graham knew Trump’s nature. “His biggest political threat is for people to go without a paycheck for weeks and get disgruntled, and he overreacts and tries to open up the economy too soon. That will be the end of him, because you’ll have another round of the virus.”

  People needed their paycheck, Graham was sure. “He’ll say, I’m tired of this, let’s open up the economy as the answer, instead of trying to fix the state unemployment systems. If they’re out of work for six weeks with no check, they’re going to hold him accountable.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  On April 6, the day after I spoke with Trump, the president began the day on a cheery note. “LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL!” he tweeted around 8:00 a.m. Later that day, American deaths rose to 10,746. One of Trump’s allies, U.K. prime minister Boris Johnson, came down with the virus and was moved into intensive care.

  It was also becoming clear the virus was disproportionately affecting minority communities. Counties that are majority-Black “have three times the rate of infections and almost six times the rate of deaths as counties where white residents are the majority,” The Washington Post reported on April 7.

  In the four-week period ending April 9, more than 17 million Americans had filed for unemployment, Labor Department figures showed.

  On April 10, Trump predicted the U.S. death count would be lower than the minimum predicted by the task force’s models. “The minimum number was 100,000 lives, and I think we’ll be substantially under that number,” he said.

  * * *

  On April 11, the death toll from the coronavirus in the United States climbed above 20,000. The United States surpassed Italy as the country with the most coronavirus fatalities in the world.

  On Sunday, April 12, Fauci was asked about a story that Trump had been too slow to act on the virus during an interview on CNN. “If you had a process that was ongoing and started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives,” Fauci said. He added: “If we had, right from the very beginning shut everything down, it may have been different. But there was a lot of pushback for shutting everything down back then.”

  Several hours later, on Sunday evening, Trump retweeted a tweet that suggested Fauci should be fired, sparking widespread speculation and worry about Fauci’s fate. Trump later told me he had a good relationship with Fauci.

  Monday afternoon, the president fought back against the criticism in a freewheeling, two-hour press briefing that began with a campaign-ad-style video touting his “decisive action” on the virus. Answering questions from reporters, Trump declined to acknowledge any mistakes and said his administration was “way ahead of schedule” in its response. When asked what he had done to prepare hospitals and ramp up testing with the extra time Trump said he bought by being ahead of schedule, the president called the reporter “disgraceful.” He alternated between blaming Democratic governors for failures and claiming he had total authority over the national response. “When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total,” Trump said. “And that’s the way it’s got to be. It’s total.”

  The next day, Trump said decisions about when to reopen would be largely in the hands of the governors. The federal government would “be there to help,” he said, but “the governors are going to be opening up their states. They’re going to declare when.”

  * * *

  I reached Trump at the White House about 10:00 p.m. Monday, April 13, to follow up with my questions on the 14 areas to tackle on the virus that we had gone over on April 5.

  He wanted to talk about Mueller, impeachment and the news media rather than the policy details of his administration’s virus response.

  “But you have a series of problems,” I said. I went to the list of 14 areas of issues that needed to be integrated in a national response for examples. “Testing.”

  “We have good testing,” he said. That day, The Washington Post reported “shortages” of personal protective equipment, or PPE, and swabs needed to perform tests across the country. The country needed “broad, rapid tests” to reopen, the Post said, but in an analysis of testing numbers “over the past two weeks, the data suggest that our ability to establish such a system has become less likely, not more.”

  I asked if he had talked to Bill Gates yet. “You will never regret listening to somebody, sir,” I said.

  “Gates,” Trump said, “and I saw him on some show and read something that he said. And one problem is if it was up to him, he’d keep the country closed for two years and you won’t have a country anymore.”

  “You’ve got lots of economic problems” too, I said. How about the unemployment benefits and those Small Business Administration loans?

  “Those are doing great, Bob.”

  The vaccines?

  �
�We probably already have the vaccine,” Trump said, although the science was far from definitive at the time. “You know the biggest problem though? You have to test it, so you have to make sure—it kills the virus, but you’ve got to make sure it doesn’t kill the person. Can you imagine? You vaccinate a hundred million people and you find out it’s poison, right?”

  What about China, where the virus originated?

  He wanted to talk about trade. “Well,” he said, “nobody’s been tougher. But we just made a $250 billion trade deal where they’ve got to buy our stuff.”

  As part of the Phase One trade deal in January, China had agreed to increase purchases from the U.S. by $200 billion over two years.

  He said the Mueller investigation had been “an attempted takedown of the president of the United States.”

  “I say this to you directly,” I said. “What happened in the past, you have to—it’s getting in the way, I think, of you doing” your job on the virus.

  “This was an attempted and failed coup,” Trump said.

  “I don’t think that’s what it is. There’s a momentum,” I said, to an investigation, trying to offer an analogy. “I wrote four books on George W. Bush’s wars. I spent hours with Bush.” He was driven by a belief that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. There was a momentum and belief a war would be easy.

  “Didn’t he come out terribly in those books?” Trump asked. The four books had traced Bush’s actions after 9/11 and the origins of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

  “The third book was called State of Denial because he got into denial,” I said.

  “He spent all that time with you,” Trump said. “And you made him look like a fool, okay, in my opinion.”

  “No, no, no,” I replied. “He had his say. He didn’t object.”

  “I hope I’m not wasting a lot of time. Because to be honest, I can think of other things I’d rather be doing.”

  “I understand,” I said. “And my job is to find the best obtainable version—”

  “Ugh,” Trump said. “And in the end you’ll probably write a lousy book. What can I say? I respect you as an author. But if that’s an example.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So your big decision now is what to do with the virus.”

  “I’m comfortable,” he said. “I’m comfortable. I’m comfortable. You won’t even know if it’s a good decision probably by the time you come out with the book. Maybe it’ll go away. But it’s possible you won’t even know about it.”

  “But I want to describe the process,” I said. I asked about Fauci and Birx and how many other experts he’d consulted.

  “Well you know Fauci got it wrong,” Trump replied. “Fauci said no problem in late February.”

  Trump was partially correct. Fauci had said on the Today show, “Right now the risk is still low, but this could change.”

  “But I like him,” Trump said. “He likes me. We have a good relationship. We’ll find out.”

  “He’s become a symbol to lots of people,” I said.

  “Well, he is,” Trump said, “but don’t forget the media don’t say that he got it wrong. They don’t ever print that he got it wrong. If I want, I can do that—but I’m not looking to do that to him. But he did get it wrong. I got it right. I put up a wall, I put up a—basically I put up a ban on China.” He was referring to his restrictions on foreigners flying into the United States from China. “I turned out to be right. Almost everybody was against me. Took a lot of heat.”

  As this book has shown earlier the five key national security and health officials, including Fauci, supported the restrictions.

  In our interview April 13, Trump continued: “It’s so easily transmissible, you wouldn’t even believe it. I was in the White House a couple of days ago. Meeting of 10 people in the Oval Office. And a guy sneezed, innocently. Not a horrible—just a sneeze. The entire room bailed out, okay? Including me, by the way.”

  “You’re risking getting it, of course,” I said. “The way you move around and have those briefings and deal with people. Are you worried about that?”

  “No, I’m not. I don’t know why I’m not. I’m not,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just not.”

  Shifting the subject, Trump returned to one of his favorite topics. Boeing was in real trouble, he said. “It’s not like somebody’s going out to buy 50 planes.”

  “They screwed up in their process,” I said. Trump too was struggling with his process. “So you’ve got the problem that Boeing had, magnified 10,000 times.” I again told Trump his handling of the virus was, in my view, the “leadership test” of “a lifetime.”

  “In terms of the importance of the decision, certainly,” he said, agreeing. “But Boeing, boy, what they’ve done to that company, you have no idea. It’s hard to believe, actually.”

  “And so you’ve got your process,” I said. “You make an—”

  Trump blew a frustrated-sounding raspberry.

  “—important point,” I finished. “By the time my book comes out, I may not know the outcome. But I want to know the process.”

  “What’s your timing?” he asked, referring to the release of the book.

  “I want to come out in September or October.”

  “So if it’s a bad book—no, think of it. If it’s a bad book, you’re right in front of my election. That’s a beauty. That’s terrible.”

  Trump said my last book, Fear, “was horrendous, but that was my fault. I would’ve loved to have seen you. But they didn’t tell me you were calling. Now it’s a much different ballgame. When you called me last time, I was under siege” with the Mueller investigation, he said. I had been unable to reach Trump for an interview for Fear, though I tried to make contact through six of his closest advisers. “Okay. I hope you treat me better than Bush, because you made him look like a stupid moron, which he was.”

  “Sir,” I said, “you’re going to be judged by how you handle the virus.”

  “I disagree,” he said. “It’ll be a part of it, but I’ve done a lot of other things too.”

  “It’s so monumental,” I said.

  “I agree,” he said. “It’s a war. It is a war. It’s like being attacked. But I’m not going to be judged entirely by that.”

  * * *

  The next evening, Lindsey Graham appeared on Fox News and defended Trump’s handling of the coronavirus crisis. “The president has overdelivered when it comes to supplies to the states, hospital beds, ventilators, you name it,” Graham told host Sean Hannity.

  Trump called Graham after watching the segment.

  “You’re your own best messenger and you’re also your own worst enemy” in the daily virus press conferences, Graham said.

  I’m getting nine million watching, Trump said.

  “I don’t doubt people are watching,” Graham said. “Just control the message.” People will have a hard time attacking you if you follow the advice of Birx and Fauci on health care and stay in close touch with the governors about a plan to open the economy.

  I’m the one that decides everything, Trump said.

  “Mr. President, all your haters would love nothing more than you make all the decisions,” Graham said. He had to listen to his outside advisers on the task force he’d assembled. “The more buy-in you can get, the wider and deeper net you throw, the better outcomes you’ll get.”

  Trump was focused on China. It was clear to Graham that Trump absolutely believed Xi had lied about the virus and personally misled him. It was hard for Trump, who liked personal relationships and liked it when heads of state were his friends. He’d felt he had a good relationship with Xi, but now he and the entire Republican Party had turned on China. Trump believed that China’s decision to withhold information had put him in the bind he was in today, Graham thought.

  Trump had recently had a call with Putin, who’d called China the largest out-of-control country on the planet. The wheels were turning on China, Gr
aham saw. Trump and Putin spoke on April 9 and 10. The public statements about the calls released by the White House and the Kremlin did not mention China.

  Graham viewed the next two weeks, between mid-April and May 1, as a critical time to make progress against the virus. They’d have to come up with a testing regime that could be built out quickly, he believed, or they were going to lose the whole summer.

  Graham told Trump again that his opponent wasn’t Biden, “It’s the coronavirus.” His presidency would be defined by this. He said Trump would win the election if “in October, we’ve got a vaccine around the corner and therapies on the shelf and we have been doing a lot of testing and there hasn’t been a major outbreak and people are beginning to go to football games in small numbers and the economy’s back.” But “if we go too far too quick and there’s another outbreak and the economy falters, you’re in trouble.”

  * * *

  As April drew on, Trump started to tell advisers he had had enough of the shutdown. We have got to reopen the country, he said. We can’t do this. This is doing irreparable damage.

  “I am not going to sit back and preside over the funeral of the greatest country in the world,” Trump said. “You guys have to realize. You’re my medical experts. But my job is to look at a lot of different factors.”

  The president had developed a complex relationship with Fauci, looking to him for advice even though Fauci was sometimes out of step with Trump’s positions and rhetoric.

  “Tony, I appreciate what you got to do,” Trump told him at one point. “You got to do what you got to do. But I’m the President of the United States. I got to put a lot of factors into my decision.”

  * * *

  Trump, at the urging of Treasury Secretary Mnuchin, finally decided the economy needed to be reopened. He sent Fauci, Birx and Redfield to work to develop a plan for reopening the country’s schools and businesses.