I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year

by Carol Leonnig

  “He’s got American blood on his hands, and the civilized world won’t miss him at all,” Kellogg added. Speaking directly to Trump, he said, “Look, sir, this is a win-win for you. It’s going to make a pretty strong point. They’re not going to stop screwing around with us until we do something dramatic.”

  Some of Trump’s advisers believed it would be difficult to kill Soleimani because he would be unlikely to leave Iran, given how tense the situation had become. But Soleimani had a history of traveling freely within the Middle East, and intelligence reports in early January indicated that Soleimani was preparing a trip.

  “This arrogance will kill him,” Kellogg told Trump and Pence.

  “What are you talking about?” Pence said.

  “He will travel,” Kellogg replied. “Trust me.”

  When Trump authorized the strike plan, he asked his advisers, “Do you think we can get him?” The president was assured they could. “Okay,” he said, “let’s do it.”

  On January 3, Soleimani flew from Damascus to Baghdad, where he was to meet with Iraqi prime minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi. After the Iranian general got into a vehicle to drive away from Baghdad International Airport, a U.S. drone fired several missiles on the motorcade, killing Soleimani and nine others.

  Trump would later regale campaign donors at a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser with a play-by-play account of watching the assassination from “cameras that are miles in the sky,” according to an audio recording of the January 17 event obtained by CNN’s Kevin Liptak.

  “Two minutes and eleven seconds to live, sir,” Trump recalled military officials telling him as they narrated the silent footage. “They’re in the car. They’re in the armored vehicle. Sir, they have approximately one minute to live, sir. Thirty seconds. Ten, nine, eight . . . They’re gone, sir. Cutting off.”

  Trump still spoke with awe about this feat more than a year later, when he sat down with us at Mar-a-Lago for an interview for this book. “It was sort of an amazing thing,” he said of killing Soleimani. Trump recalled a conversation with Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan. “I was with Khan of Pakistan. A great athlete. Did you know he was the Mickey Mantle of cricket? He was a great athlete, handsome guy, and I met with him and he said to me, ‘President, I’ve been through a lot in my life. I’ve been a star.’ He’s a big, big athletic star and very popular in Pakistan. He said, ‘When Soleimani was taken out it was the single biggest thing I can ever remember happening in my life.’ ”

  It was typical of Trump to be an overly dramatic and indiscreet braggart. But he had reason to crow. Soleimani was the second successful assassination of a top terrorist target he had ordered in under three months. On October 26, 2019, U.S. forces had killed Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

  During the al-Baghdadi raid by Delta Force operators, supported by a heroic dog (a Belgian Malinois named Conan), Milley narrated the black-and-white thermal video feed for the president in the White House Situation Room. Trump sat calmly as the operation unfolded, until he saw the explosions and Milley said, “We got the guy.”

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  In early January, U.S. intelligence agencies began including warnings about the novel coronavirus and updates about the contagion’s spread in the President’s Daily Brief, a top-secret catalogue of the government’s latest information about emerging security threats and conflicts around the globe. Yet Trump ignored the alerts. He rarely read his written PDB, and he would later claim that the coronavirus did not rise to his attention in those early days.

  But all around him, Trump’s advisers were growing increasingly alarmed. Matthew Pottinger, the White House’s deputy national security adviser, had been monitoring Redfield’s reports but felt his first pang of worry shortly after January 10, while traveling for work to India and the United Kingdom. Pottinger had lived through the SARS outbreak, covering it from China as a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, and he feared the Communist government would try to conceal key information about this new pathogen—anything it considered potentially embarrassing to the nation. While on the road, he saw an article quoting a respected Chinese doctor he knew, who registered grave concern about the virus. Pottinger sent his staff an email: “If this doctor is concerned, then I’m concerned.” He authorized Anthony Ruggiero, a director for weapons of mass destruction and biodefense, to convene daily NSC meetings to provide the latest on the virus, starting January 14.

  At the CDC, meanwhile, officials were growing increasingly alarmed. That same day, on January 10, the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center, a Chinese lab that had a partnership with a Wuhan hospital, was the first to publish the genome sequence of the virus, using samples from Wuhan patients. The lab’s researchers uploaded the information into a publicly available website for medical investigators to share pathogen research and ideas.

  The genome data was a huge leap forward for the world health community for two reasons. First, it confirmed the virus was a novel coronavirus, a version of SARS, and very likely derived from bats. Second, it gave labs everywhere critical information they needed to start developing a test to detect the virus. A crucial way to prevent an outbreak was to identify those who had the virus and keep them isolated.

  But the release of the genome sequence gave a false impression that the Chinese were willing to share important and helpful information about the virus. In fact, several other labs that had confirmed the genomic sequence were blocked by the Chinese government from publishing information, and one of them was ordered not to discuss the virus with the media. After the Shanghai lab published its information online, government health officials were privately furious and, as punishment, temporarily shuttered the lab. In public, they would later point to the publication as proof of their scientists’ talent and dedication to sharing information.

  For Fauci, this was déjà vu. He had learned during the SARS outbreak not to trust that the Chinese were necessarily sharing the full story. His red flag went up. “Here we go again,” he told associates. “Let’s keep an open mind about this.” Fauci called the Virus Research Center to tell them to use the Chinese genome sequencing to begin developing a vaccine.

  Initially, Fauci and his boss, Dr. Francis Collins, the longtime director of the National Institutes of Health, were concerned this might have been a human-engineered virus that had gotten loose in China, either accidentally or, worse, intentionally. But after convening several experts on viral genome evolution to study that possibility, it was ruled out. Only nature could have designed this virus, they concluded.

  On January 12, the Chinese government formally shared the genomic sequence with the World Health Organization, which provided the optimistic assessment that there was no evidence of widespread transmission and that the outbreak was a small cluster that Chinese authorities appeared to have under control.

  But the very next day, January 13, Thailand reported a patient infected by the novel coronavirus, a woman from Wuhan but the first known case outside China. Redfield and Fauci both recognized the significance: The virus was no longer contained to Wuhan or the surrounding Hubei Province. It was spreading fast. Redfield got Gao on the phone and the Chinese CDC director confirmed what Redfield didn’t really want to hear: Wuhan doctors were reporting that the disease appeared to transmit easily, based on the growing number of patients in the area.

  At this moment, America’s frontline defense against the virus known as COVID-19 was being led by Redfield and Fauci as well as Alex Azar, the secretary of health and human services. Unbeknownst to this trio, the first patient with COVID-19 had entered the United States that very day. A Chicago woman in her sixties was traveling home from Wuhan after a trip to take care of her sick father there. She arrived at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport feeling fine, but within a few days would call her doctor complaining of strained breathing and was admitted to a local hospital. Days after that, her physicians realized sh
e had also infected her husband.

  On January 14, China’s top health minister privately warned provincial health officials that the virus was likely on its way to becoming a pandemic. In a secret teleconference, the minister urged nationwide screening for the illness and declared the public health peril so grave it required a “Level One” emergency response, the highest in China. The country had embarked on building the first of five new hospitals to handle the flood of cases. Furthermore, since late December Chinese health officials had been urging doctors and nurses to take extreme precautions, such as wearing personal protective equipment when treating patients infected with the virus and creating isolation wards in which to treat them.

  Yet, on the eve of announcing a major trade deal with the United States, the Chinese kept these fears and precautions hidden from the general public and even from the WHO. That same day the organization parroted Beijing’s insistence that the virus was not spreading from human to human. “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China,” the WHO said on its official Twitter account. This was a lie of gross omission. But the timing of the lie was important for a Chinese government obsessed with reputation and public optics. And luckily for them, Trump’s political goals played right into their hands.

  The next day, January 15, Trump hosted a signing ceremony with Chinese officials to execute the first phase of a trade deal between the two countries. Appearing in the grandeur of the East Room of the White House, adorned with rich gold drapery and three giant crystal chandeliers, Trump crowed about the accord for forty-eight minutes in a rambling monologue. Some attendees, including House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, had to leave midspeech to get back to the Capitol for votes. Even the high-level Chinese delegation, confident they had outnegotiated the Americans, looked somewhat stiff and pained while waiting for the president to wrap up.

  “I want to thank President Xi, who is watching as we speak—and I’ll be going over to China in the not-too-distant future to reciprocate. But I want to thank President Xi, a very, very good friend of mine,” Trump told his assembled guests.

  According to the agreement, China would buy roughly $200 billion in U.S. goods, mostly agricultural, over two years in exchange for U.S. companies expanding access to Chinese markets and adding intellectual property protections. But experts doubted how much the deal benefited the United States, considering Trump had waged a trade war with China that damaged U.S. businesses and drove up the price of Chinese-manufactured appliances and other goods. Still, Trump had what he wanted: a deal that he could boast was “great for America,” signed at the dawn of his reelection year.

  About an hour after Trump finished speaking, a thirty-five-year-old man from Washington State arrived at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on a commercial flight from China, returning home from a business trip to an area just outside Wuhan. He didn’t know it at the time, but he was carrying the virus. A few days after getting home, the man would suffer severe flu-like symptoms and be taken to a hospital in Everett, a bedroom community of Seattle.

  He would become the second person known to enter the United States with this mystery respiratory disease. But the Trump administration would not learn about the man’s case until five days after he had landed at Sea-Tac airport.

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  On January 16, Trump awoke in an especially foul mood. His impeachment trial was set to formally begin at the Capitol that day. He had been impeached a month earlier by the Democrat-controlled House—only the third president in history to receive that momentous rebuke—for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress in soliciting help for his reelection campaign from the Ukrainian government. Now, he faced trial in the Senate. The upper chamber was controlled by Republicans, who complained the accusations were unfair and the impeachment a Democratic hit job, so his acquittal seemed a foregone conclusion, yet still the trial promised to be excruciating for the president.

  Shortly before noon, the seven Democratic House impeachment managers solemnly entered the Senate chamber to deliver their articles of impeachment. One of them, Representative Adam Schiff, the Democratic House Intelligence Committee chairman and a favorite Trump foil, read out the articles in a formal, almost dour manner. Schiff explained that Trump had acted with “corrupt motive” when he pressured the newly elected president of Ukraine to announce an investigation of his leading Democratic challenger, former vice president Joe Biden, and his son Hunter Biden.

  Chief Justice John Roberts of the Supreme Court, who had also drawn Trump’s wrath over the years, took the rostrum and was sworn in to preside over the trial, and senators took their oath swearing to “do impartial justice” and decide whether the president should be removed from office.

  Trump passed word to his aides to tell reporters he wasn’t watching the proceedings because he was so busy with work in the Oval Office, yet the president seemed to know exactly what was transpiring in the Senate Chamber. That afternoon at 3:39 he tweeted, “I JUST GOT IMPEACHED FOR MAKING A PERFECT PHONE CALL!”

  Later that day, a little after 5:00, Trump met with some of his campaign advisers. At the time, the Trump team thought Senators Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren might be the Democratic nominee, and both were running on expanding health-care access as signature issues. The Trump campaign’s data showed that voters trusted Democrats more than Republicans on health care, especially when it came to protecting coverage for those with preexisting conditions, and that the president’s plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act was unpopular. Trump also faced a polling deficit on the issue of prescription drug pricing.

  Tony Fabrizio, a longtime Republican pollster who worked on Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns, argued that health care would be top of mind to voters, especially in Florida and some other battleground states, and that if Trump could sign an executive order or otherwise enact policies protecting those with preexisting conditions he might fare better against the Democrats. Reminded that the White House counsel’s office was drafting some such orders, Trump lashed out.

  “Yeah, like they work on everything else,” Trump said. “They’re so fucking slow.”

  Trump was already smarting that week over a series of ads Michael Bloomberg, the former New York mayor running for the Democratic presidential nomination, was airing, criticizing Trump’s failure to produce a health-care plan despite his campaign promise to do so. The polling presentation sent him into a rageful fury.

  “This vaping ban shit is hurting me,” Trump said, referring to the administration’s push led by Azar to ban flavors in e-cigarettes in the fall of 2019.

  Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager, spoke up to say he, too, believed the e-cigarette ban was suppressing Trump’s support with voters who vape.

  “Get me Azar on the phone!” Trump cried out to his assistant.

  Once the health secretary was reached on his cell phone, the president tore into him, and put the line on speakerphone to make the campaign advisers listen in.

  “I’m losing on drug pricing,” Trump told Azar. “I’m getting killed on drug pricing. The polling shows the Democrats are beating me on drug prices. You’ve got to fix that.”

  “Mr. President,” Azar responded, “you’re losing on drug pricing because you’ve done literally nothing on drug pricing.”

  “What do you mean?” Trump asked.

  “Literally everything I’ve tried to do on cutting drug costs, you have killed it,” Azar replied.

  The president then pivoted to e-cigarettes.

  “I never should have done this vaping thing,” Trump said. “I’m going to get fucked on this.”

  “You lost me the election, Alex,” he continued. “Everywhere I go, every rally I go to, they are holding signs: ‘I vape. I vote.’ They told me you have hurt me in the polls. We shoul
d have left it alone. You should have let me leave it alone. I shouldn’t have done any of that.”

  As Trump bellowed, Azar thought he was living in a bad movie. Trump had picked this same fight with Azar nearly half a dozen times since rolling out the e-cigarette policy in September 2019. At the time Trump embraced the ban on flavors and told reporters that he and his wife had been antivaping advocates in part because their teenage son had become curious about vaping. The president acknowledged telling Barron, “Don’t vape! Don’t vape!”

  “That’s how the first lady got involved,” Trump said. “She’s got a son . . . a beautiful young man, and she feels very, very strongly.”

  But Trump’s resolve melted away as soon as Parscale had told the president the vaping regulations could backfire with part of his political base. The day after the announcement, Azar was in the Democratic Republic of Congo for a visit related to the deadly Ebola outbreak when his cell phone rang. It was the president, and he was screaming.

  “You have lost me the election!” Trump yelled at the secretary. It was all about Azar pushing Trump to ban flavored e-cigarettes. “Brad tells me I’m going to lose the election now because the vapers are my core constituents and they’re not going to show up and vote!”

  From his hotel room in Kinshasa, Azar tried to calm Trump down and explain that the ban on flavored e-cigarettes had a huge upside with voters, too. “Every suburban mom thanks you—you’ve taken these horrific products out of the hands of their children,” Azar said. “I have won you the election!”

  But Trump was not to be reasoned with. “It’s your fault if I lose, Alex!” he yelled.

  From that moment on, Azar was solidly in the president’s doghouse.

  The January 16 conversation felt to Azar like a broken record. Azar once again tried to reason with his boss.

  “You’ve gotten praised in every editorial page in the country,” he told Trump. “You have parents thanking you for empowering them. You have teachers thanking you. These long-haired hippie vapers, if they voted for you before, aren’t going to switch sides now.”