Rage

by Bob Woodward

  An abundance of evidence indicated Trump had not. The constant upheaval and deep internal contradictions remained.

  On May 15—a week later, right on Kushner’s schedule—Trump announced he had selected Dr. Moncef Slaoui, a former vaccine chairman at GlaxoSmithKline, to lead the vaccine effort as an overall czar.

  In public comments in the Rose Garden, Slaoui provided some good news: “In fact, Mr. President, I have very recently seen early data from a clinical trial with a coronavirus vaccine. And this data made me feel even more confident that we will be able to deliver a few hundred million doses of vaccine by the end of 2020.” A few days later, biotech company Moderna announced promising early results from a phase one trial. Slaoui had served on the board of Moderna until Trump announced his White House role and still had stock options in Moderna valued at over $10 million.

  In his speech in the Rose Garden, Trump dubbed the vaccine effort Operation Warp Speed and said he was launching “the most aggressive vaccine project in history. There’s never been a vaccine project anywhere in history like this.”

  But in his next breath, Trump immediately undermined his own effort.

  “And I just want to make something clear. It’s very important: Vaccine or no vaccine, we’re back.” The economy was reopening no matter what happened. “In many cases, they don’t have vaccines, and a virus or a flu comes, and you fight through it.”

  FORTY-ONE

  At 9:18 p.m. on Friday, May 22, 2020, I reached President Trump by phone at the White House.

  What about your relationship with Chinese president Xi?

  “You know,” Trump said to me, “I’ve very much hardened on China. So, I’m not happy. Let me tell you, I’m not a happy camper.”

  What turned you? I asked.

  “I wanted people to go into China,” he said, referring to the crack U.S. team of medical experts Trump, Redfield and Fauci wanted to send to investigate the virus back in January.

  I said I knew he had tried twice with Xi.

  “He didn’t want to do it,” Trump said referring to Xi. “I was okay with it. You know why? Because I figured they knew what they were doing. Okay? And they either did or they were incompetent, and either one is no good.”

  Trump was doing a 180-degree turn from his natural optimism. He seemed to be searching for someone to blame.

  “But he stiffed you,” I said, “when you look back.”

  “No he didn’t stiff—let’s say—you know, he’s a prideful person,” Trump said. “But he thought he was able to contain it.” He added tellingly, “Or not.”

  Trump continued, “I think what could’ve happened, Bob, is it got away from them and he didn’t want to contain it from the rest of the world because it would’ve put him at a big disadvantage. And we were already beating them very badly. You know, on trade.”

  Now I was utterly surprised. It had never occurred to me that Trump would think President Xi had intentionally let the virus spread.

  Trump turned to the book. “You’re probably going to screw me,” Trump said. “You know, because that’s the way it goes. Look, Bush sat with you for hours and you screwed him. But the difference was, I ain’t no Bush. Boy oh boy, what a mess. I’m trying to get out of that mess that he got us into in the Middle East.”

  He talked about his ambitious goals for troop withdrawals and obtaining more money from countries the U.S. helped protect, as he put it, “even a little thing like getting massive amounts of money from some of these countries that were freeriding us.”

  At another point, Trump turned to his judicial nominations. “I’m going to be up to 280 judges very soon. A lot of them are older and we convinced many of them to go on senior leave.” He meant senior status, in which judges can effectively retire but stay active on the bench with a reduced case load. This leaves a vacancy the president can fill.

  “And more importantly,” Trump said, “Obama gave us 142 judges when I came here. They’re like golden nuggets.” Republicans had controlled the Senate for the last two years of the Obama presidency and Majority Leader McConnell blocked most appointments.

  “Do you ever get down?” I asked. “Do you ever feel, my God, an avalanche of one thousand problems has descended on me?”

  “This is a good thing,” Trump said. “I’m so busy”—and he laughed—“I don’t have time to get down. Okay? It’s crazy.” And he immediately went off on how the United States was providing protection to Saudi Arabia but he had told the Saudis, “You’ve got to pay.”

  * * *

  National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien shared Trump’s suspicions about Xi and China. In a West Wing White House meeting more than two weeks later, June 11, O’Brien told an aide that China had concealed what was happening.

  “They covered it up,” he said, referring to the government’s attempt to conceal the genetic sequencing on the virus. “One lab published it, and then it was immediately taken down and the lab was threatened.”

  O’Brien continued, “It appears that they closed down travel all through China so that this disease couldn’t get to Shanghai or Beijing and other key cities. But at the same time they’re letting other folks travel from Wuhan to all over Europe and infected Europe and infected the United States. That’s not good. But whatever happened the Chinese have repurposed it into a bioweapon. And they’re using it, they’re attempting to take advantage of Covid to gain a geopolitical advantage over the United States and the free world, and to displace the United States as the leading power in the world.”

  O’Brien considered Trump’s assertion that Xi “didn’t want to contain it from the rest of the world because it would’ve put him at a big disadvantage” as “an absolutely reasonable hypothesis.”

  In 2020 an aggressive new approach to international relations called “wolf warrior” diplomacy had emerged from a defensive China.

  O’Brien said since Covid “hit the whole world, they’re using it with what they call their wolf diplomacy and for a long time they were attempting to trade PPE to get access for Huawei into countries. They were bullying countries into thanking them. They were bullying countries into saying things about the U.S. But overall, the theme is that they, as an authoritarian government, with all their surveillance state and their concentration camps and all that sort of thing, offer a better alternative for the world, a more efficient alternative, a kind of weird, nationalistic, technocratic alternative to the world that’s better than liberal democracy. And Covid is an example of why the world should embrace China and Chinese values, and the Chinese form of hybrid capitalist-mercantilist-communist government.”

  O’Brien said, “they’re taking every measure possible during this crisis to displace the United States. And we’ve got a hell of a fight on our hands.

  “They covered up a lot about this virus because they want to present this model of ruthless efficiency,” he said.

  For example the Chinese have said that somewhere between 4,000 and 15,000 people in China died from the virus. O’Brien said he believed that the true number was in the 100,000 range, about the same as in the U.S. in late May.

  O’Brien described an apocalyptic wasteland gleaned from social media, before it was removed by government censors. “They welded people into their apartments. They eventually came in a couple weeks later and pried open the doors and opened up, there were a lot of elderly people that died of dehydration and starvation. There were all kinds of people that hung themselves out their windows.”

  O’Brien concluded the consequences were dire. “If we lose our economic edge and we lose our economic might and stay closed for too much longer, we might be in a position where we couldn’t stay ahead or maybe we’d get behind and couldn’t catch up.”

  For CDC chief Redfield the Chinese failure to close down international flights was disastrous. He told colleagues the United States had silently filled with Covid-19 infections “from Italy, Spain, Germany, France, Great Britain, Belgium.” All this late-winter travel brought clust
ers of Covid to the United States. “Also unknown to us that probably half of those clusters weren’t even symptomatic, so you couldn’t find them” with airport screening.

  “It was difficult to understand how China had aggressive travel restrictions within China, and yet did not move to any travel restrictions” for people who wanted to leave China and go abroad, Redfield said.

  “If there could have been one major, global action that could’ve really saved hundreds of thousands of lives, it’s if they had just shut down their out-of-China travel at the same time they shut down their intra-China travel.

  “They really started moving in the latter part of January. That’s where they quarantined people. That’s where they shut down the city. That’s where they stopped the trains. They really locked down all of Wuhan at one point. I think they quarantined over 11 million people. You couldn’t go from Wuhan to Beijing, but you could go Wuhan to London.”

  FORTY-TWO

  On May 25, a Minneapolis police officer was caught on video with his knee on the neck of George Floyd for eight minutes and 46 seconds, torturing and killing Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man. A massive wave of angry protests erupted in more than 2,000 cities and towns on a scale not seen in America since the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. “Black Lives Matter” extended its reach as a rallying cry against racism and police brutality.

  While most of the protests against police misconduct and racial inequality were peaceful, television news was filled with chaotic scenes of rioting, looting and buildings set afire in major cities.

  In Washington, D.C., a fire was set in the basement nursery of the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church, 1,000 feet from the White House, on Sunday, May 31. Following the fire, the church had been boarded up. A city curfew set by D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser was scheduled to begin the next day, June 1, at 7:00 p.m.

  Trump, in a phone call with governors that afternoon, stressed the need to use force against the demonstrators. He wanted an energetic crackdown.

  “You have to dominate,” Trump said. “If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time. They’re going to run all over you, you’ll look like a bunch of jerks. You have to dominate, and you have to arrest people, and you have to try people and they have to go to jail for long periods of time.”

  That day, hundreds of mostly peaceful protesters gathered in the area around Lafayette Square, a seven-acre public park between St. John’s Church and the White House.

  At around 6:30 p.m., without apparent provocation, officers in riot gear suddenly advanced on the protesters, tossing riot control devices into the crowd that created loud explosions, sparks and smoke. Videos show officers pushing protesters to the ground, shooting some with rubber projectiles and spraying others with a chemical agent. Authorities shot “pepper balls”—projectiles containing a powdered chemical that irritates the eyes and nose—at the protesters. Officers on horseback pushed protesters further away from Lafayette Square.

  “I didn’t see any provocation that would warrant the deployment of munitions,” Mayor Bowser said afterward.

  It was a jarring display of militarized government forces against those exercising their First Amendment rights to assemble.

  At 6:48 p.m., just minutes after forces dispersed the protesters, Trump began a speech in the White House’s Rose Garden about the unrest sweeping across the country.

  “All Americans were rightly sickened and revolted by the brutal death of George Floyd,” Trump said. “My administration is fully committed that, for George and his family, justice will be served. He will not have died in vain. But we cannot allow the righteous cries and peaceful protesters to be drowned out by an angry mob.

  “The biggest victims of the rioting are peace-loving citizens in our poorest communities, and as their president, I will fight to keep them safe. I will fight to protect you. I am your president of law and order, and an ally of all peaceful protesters.”

  Trump spent most of the seven-minute address promising to combat what he described as “riots and lawlessness that has spread throughout our country.” He recommended that each governor deploy the National Guard “in sufficient numbers that we dominate the streets.”

  “If a city or a state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residents,” he said, “then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.”

  After his Rose Garden address, at about 7 p.m., Trump left the White House grounds. A coterie of advisers followed, including Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley in a camouflage uniform, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, O’Brien, Attorney General Barr, Kushner and Ivanka. The president walked the 1,000 feet north through Lafayette Square to St. John’s, known as “the Church of the Presidents.”

  When the president reached the church, Ivanka pulled a Bible out of her white handbag and handed it to her father.

  Trump stood in front of the church for about two minutes, holding the Bible awkwardly and waving it around.

  “Is that your Bible?” a reporter asked.

  “It’s a Bible,” Trump answered.

  A reporter asked the president what his thoughts were.

  “We have a great country,” he said. “That’s my thoughts.”

  It appeared the president had walked to the church to give photographers and cameramen an opportunity to take his picture with the burned church and a Bible as props.

  After a few moments, Trump motioned to his advisers and Meadows, Barr, Esper, O’Brien and Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany walked over to join him in standing in a line in front of the church.

  “I am outraged,” the Episcopal bishop of Washington, Mariann Edgar Budde, said afterward. “Everything he has said and done is to inflame violence.”

  “This evening,” Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Michael Curry said, “the President of the United States stood in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, lifted up a bible, and had pictures of himself taken. In so doing, he used a church building and the Holy Bible for partisan political purposes.”

  Later, the White House and the U.S. Park Police defended the dispersal of the crowd, citing “violent protesters.” Footage of the protest shows that at least two protesters threw water bottles at the police.

  About three hours later, two helicopters operated by the D.C. Army National Guard hovered over the remaining protesters. The helicopters flew as low as 45 feet—below the heights of some buildings—creating wind speeds equivalent to a tropical storm, snapping thick tree limbs, swirling the air with dust and broken glass. Many protesters ran for cover in panic and confusion. The use of helicopters to disperse civilians is a common tactic in war zones.

  * * *

  Mattis broke his long-held silence, issuing a statement.

  “When I joined the military, some 50 years ago,” Mattis wrote, “I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander in chief, with military leadership standing alongside.…

  “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try,” he continued. “Instead, he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership.”

  Trump responded with a series of tweets later that evening. “I didn’t like his ‘leadership’ style or much else about him, and many others agree,” Trump tweeted about Mattis. “Glad he is gone!”

  Soon after, Mayor Bowser had “Black Lives Matter” painted in giant yellow letters on the street leading to Lafayette Square and the White House.

  Protests against racial injustice and inequities continued to fill streets across the country in the weeks that fo
llowed.

  * * *

  Two days after his law-and-order speech, Trump returned my call. It was the morning of June 3.

  “Hi, Bob, how’s the book? Am I keeping you busy enough?”

  “You give me new chapters,” I said.

  “Yeah. It’s law and order, Bob, law and order. We’re right where I want.”

  “Do you have a few minutes to—”

  “Law and order, Bob.” He launched into his talking points about how the economy would start to get better, how the states that were reopening were strong, and how the administration was doing very well on vaccines and therapeutics for the virus.

  “And we’re going to get ready to send in the military slash National Guard to some of these poor bastards that don’t know what they’re doing, these poor radical lefts.” And he added pointedly, “Of course, you’re a poor radical left to an extent, I guess.”

  I asked if Trump had watched the George Floyd tape.

  “Yeah, I saw it. It was terrible. I thought it was a terrible thing. I’ve said it—” He reminded me that in an earlier speech in Florida for a NASA and SpaceX rocket launch, he had talked about George Floyd. He had devoted eight minutes to Floyd.

  Where did you watch it? Did he watch the whole thing, or just parts of it?

  “Sure I got to watch it. Everybody did. All you need was a television. I watched it numerous times. I mean, mostly I was in the White House, upstairs, because I don’t get to watch much television during the day. I mean, upstairs. And I watched it. It’s been on, it’s been on a lot. No, it’s a terrible thing, and strong feeling toward it. I don’t like it at all. I’m very unhappy about it. And action has been taken and it will be taken, and it will be dealt with. And I think the riots are—I put it out in Minneapolis. That was the worst one of all. They were ripping down the city. They’re all liberal Democrats, every one of them is a liberal Democrat. Hard to believe, right?”