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

by Carol Leonnig

  “Mr. President, if that happens, you’ll get credit for it,” Christie said. “You don’t need to keep saying it. Talk about it as if it’s serious, and if it gets better, you win anyway. Play worst-case on this.”

  Christie encouraged Trump to reframe his presidency around the pandemic as a way to inspire all Americans, not just Republicans, to rally behind him.

  “Say, ‘You know, up until today the position of president was a job, but now it’s a mission, and I’m not going to leave here until the mission is completed,’ ” Christie said. “That’s what I said during Sandy: ‘Being governor was a job—a great job, but it was a job. Now it’s a mission, and I’m not going to let anybody knock me off of the mission that I have to accomplish for the people of New Jersey, which is to rebuild the state that we love.’ Say it over and over and over and over and over again and people believe it because you keep saying it over and over again, because it comes from a place that’s seen as genuine.”

  Trump nodded as he listened, but was noncommittal. It was clear the president didn’t buy into Christie’s advice.

  * * *

  —

  Like many other big states, Illinois was running low on ventilators, masks, gowns, and other supplies and equipment. Pritzker repeatedly had asked the Trump administration for help but seemed to get nowhere. The governor had reached his last resort and decided to call the president.

  Pritzker loathed Trump. Campaigning for governor in 2018, he would assail the president in his stump speeches as “racist,” “misogynistic,” “homophobic,” and “xenophobic.” Curiously, though, Trump had a soft spot for Pritzker. He was a multibillionaire, and Trump liked to suck up to the uber-rich. The Pritzker family, one of America’s wealthiest, founded and developed the Hyatt hotel chain, and New York’s Grand Hyatt was one of Trump’s proudest real estate deals.

  In December 2018, when Pritzker and other governors-elect first visited the White House following their elections, Trump made a beeline past Florida’s Ron DeSantis and other political allies to shake hands with the Democrat from Chicago. “J. B., you come from a great family. A great family,” Trump said, patting Pritzker on the shoulder. “Congratulations on your win, and I just want you to know, you come from a great family.”

  Now at a loss for how to bring supplies into Illinois, Pritzker called Trump on March 23 in an attempt to play to the president’s ego. He wrote out a script for himself, knowing he might get angry and wanting to stay calm and collected.

  “Like you, Mr. President, I’m a former businessman,” Pritzker told Trump. “I normally don’t like government interfering with the commercial market. But with regard to ventilators and PPE, if you could invoke the [Defense Production Act], it would stop the price gouging and put some order into the market. As it is, states are competing with each other and against foreign countries, too. You have the power to save lives, to control distribution of these goods, and we need your help.”

  “What do you need?” Trump asked.

  Pritzker ticked through his list, from masks to ventilators to gowns and gloves.

  “Let me see what I can do,” Trump said, and ended the call.

  About half an hour later, Pritzker’s phone rang. It was Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade adviser, who had taken on a new role coordinating manufacturing and Defense Production Act policies.

  “I think I can help you out,” Navarro told the governor. “I’ve got three hundred ventilators in our private stock and I can send those to you. And I’ve got three hundred thousand N95 masks. I can get those out of our private stock and I can get them to you in Trump time.”

  “Wow, Trump time?” Pritzker replied. “That sounds pretty fast. When do you think we could see those?”

  “I’ll get it to you by Sunday,” Navarro said, which was six days later. He had one favor to ask of Pritzker, according to people with knowledge of the conversation: “Make sure when you’re on TV next you are grateful to the president.”

  Navarro denied that he asked Pritzker to praise Trump and said he only asked the governor to “tone down his partisan rhetoric.”

  Nothing arrived on Sunday. When the federal shipment showed up several days late, it contained the three hundred ventilators, but the three hundred thousand masks were of the surgical variety, not nearly as efficacious as N95 masks. Navarro told Pritzker he would investigate what went wrong with the order. A couple of weeks later, Navarro called Pritzker to follow up.

  “Listen, I’ve got six hundred gallons of hand sanitizer,” he told the governor. “Do you need hand sanitizer?”

  Pritzker needed N95 masks, not hand sanitizer. He accepted the shipment, happy to just get something from Washington. But “Trump time,” he concluded, was nothing more than a clever and deceptive sales pitch.

  Five

  Rebelling Against the Experts

  President Trump decided on March 16 to effectively shut down the country for fifteen days. But the doctors on his task force knew they would need more time to control the spread of the coronavirus. They immediately started working to convince Trump to extend the lockdown. Mark Meadows, Steven Mnuchin, Larry Kudlow, and other advisers, who believed the shutdown would mean unnecessarily destroying the economy, opposed them. Trump, who saw the economy as key to his reelection chances, was predisposed to agree. He made that much clear on March 23 when, amid the administration’s review of extending shutdown recommendations, he tweeted in all caps, “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF.”

  The country at this point was gripped by fear, and the president fixated on being the savior. When NBC’s Peter Alexander asked him at the March 20 coronavirus briefing, “What do you say to Americans who are watching you right now who are scared,” Trump snapped. “I say that you are a terrible reporter. That’s what I say. I think it’s a very nasty question. I think it’s a very bad signal that you are putting out to the American people. They’re looking for answers and they’re looking for hope. And you’re doing sensationalism.”

  Trump had never managed to show empathy during his presidency, and even in this crisis, he still did not summon compassion for others.

  The president decided he wanted the country to reopen and arbitrarily picked a date of April 12, which happened to be Easter, because he assumed voters would be heartened by images of church pews packed with parishioners on Easter Sunday and families out celebrating over brunch in neighborhood restaurants. Some of his advisers warned him this could be perilous.

  “Mr. President, this is a huge mistake,” Kellyanne Conway told him. “You don’t own the deaths right now, but you’ll own all the deaths if you do this.”

  Easter Sunday, Conway argued, was “too soon. You can’t put an artificial date on reopening the economy.”

  “No, no, no,” Trump replied. “We have to open. It’s killing people.”

  “I get it,” Conway said. “But we can’t even see this virus. It’s transmitted through the air. And if you reopen now, you’ll own it.”

  As a counterweight to the economic and political concerns dominating the thinking inside the White House, Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, Robert Redfield, and Stephen Hahn formed an alliance. They began meeting as a “doctors’ group” three to four times a week to strategize for when they faced off later against Meadows, Mnuchin, Kudlow, and others at the broader task-force meetings.

  Birx and Fauci analyzed publicly available data, including from the CDC, to model dire projections of deaths without continued social distancing and other mitigation efforts. As many as 1.6 million to 2.2 million Americans would die, their analysis showed, whereas by continuing the lockdown the estimated fatality total would be 100,000 to 240,000. They presented the findings to Trump, arguing that keeping restrictions in place would save lives. Birx knew that Trump was moved by anecdotes and personal connections, and at the time, Elmhurst Hospital, a public hospital in Queens near where he grew up, was b
eing overrun with COVID cases. Cable news channels were showing footage from Elmhurst of body bags piling up.

  “These hospitals that are serving our most vulnerable Americans are all over the United States,” Birx told Trump. “We have six thousand–plus hospitals in the United States. You could, right off the bat, have a thousand Elmhursts.”

  “Are you sure that this will create more Elmhursts?” Trump asked her, referring to a spike in cases if the economy reopened prematurely.

  “Yes, I’m sure,” Birx said.

  Trump was persuaded. On March 29, the president announced from the Rose Garden that the strict federal guidelines that effectively shut down businesses would be extended for an additional thirty days, through April 30.

  “Nothing would be worse than declaring victory before the victory is won,” Trump said. “That would be the greatest loss of all.”

  Trump said the ghastly scenes from Elmhurst helped convince him.

  “I’ve been watching that for the last week on television, body bags all over in hallways,” Trump said. “I have been watching them bring in trailer trucks, freezer trucks—they are freezer trucks because they can’t handle the bodies, there are so many of them. This is essentially in my community in Queens—Queens, New York. I have seen things I’ve never seen before. I mean, I’ve seen them, but I’ve seen them on television in faraway lands.”

  The doctors had prevailed, but their win would prove short-lived.

  * * *

  —

  Max Kennedy Jr. was an unlikely candidate to work for the Trump administration’s coronavirus response—unlikely both because he was a lifelong Democrat and a grandson of the late Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and because he was twenty-six years old and had neither expertise in public health nor experience in crisis management. But that didn’t stop Jared Kushner from bringing Kennedy on board, along with roughly a dozen other twentysomething consultants and private-equity analysts. Kushner figured these financial whiz kids, volunteering directly for him and outside the strictures of government health agencies, could bust through bureaucratic logjams and solve problems like the supply chain for personal protective equipment. If only it had been that easy.

  Kennedy said that when he first reported to work on March 22, he stepped into chaos. He was assigned to the “sourcing team,” meaning his job would be to source test kits, hand sanitizer, masks, and other equipment from manufacturers overseas. He and the other volunteers cold-called factories in China on their personal cell phones asking if they would sell goods to the U.S. government. He said they conducted business over their Gmail accounts and had to copy someone with a “.gov” email address to confirm they were reaching out on behalf of the government. They weren’t dummies; Kennedy had graduated from Harvard and worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Company before joining Insight Partners, a midsized equity firm. But he and the other volunteers were the first to admit they had no idea what they were doing.

  The supervisor on this sourcing project, Rachael Baitel, didn’t know much more. She was a former executive assistant to Ivanka Trump and Goldman Sachs analyst. No one on the team had existing manufacturing relationships or was versed in FDA regulations or understood federal procurement policies. Kennedy said that another superior in the operation, Michael Duffey, instructed him never to put anything in writing to him—no emails, no text messages. Kennedy thought that was strange, then he Googled Duffey and learned he had been the Office of Management and Budget official who withheld aid to Ukraine, and some of his emails had become evidence in Trump’s impeachment investigation.

  The volunteers worked out of the Federal Emergency Management Administration’s headquarters, where khaki-clad employees nicknamed the newcomers the Slim Suit Crowd for their natty attire. In the West Wing, Kushner’s group was mocked more derisively; “that whizbang crew of numb nuts” was how one senior official described it. In their FEMA offices, nobody wore masks or socially distanced. When Vice President Pence visited them, he walked around a small conference room shaking people’s hands and patting them on the back, as if the virus somehow couldn’t penetrate their bubble.

  Kushner was a self-styled fixer, establishing himself as the administration’s key conduit for federal agency officials, state governors, and business executives—especially when it came to the PPE supply chain. The thirty-nine-year-old had only ever worked in real estate and had no expertise in international logistics. He had never marshaled a response to a crisis, much less a pandemic. But because of his exalted status as husband to the president’s favorite child, Kushner carried himself with supreme confidence and could spur swift responses from across the administration, where one’s power was measured by loyalty and proximity to Trump. He gave his cell-phone number to government procurement officials and instructed them to communicate directly with him to approve international orders. Kushner wanted money to be wired to manufacturers within minutes, not days, lest the United States lose out to another country, and he personally called the chief executive officers of FedEx and UPS to deploy their planes to deliver freight.

  Kushner would pay frequent visits to the volunteer team and issue decrees. He had an air of self-importance, as if he alone could bust through barriers. When volunteers flagged problems, Kushner vowed to get them solved right away. Some things got fixed, but chaos endured.

  Kushner expected his team to follow up on every lead about sourcing or delivering PPE. Kennedy said the team became easily distracted by incoming ideas or requests from VIPs, which the volunteers had been instructed to prioritize—including an email from Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban; repeated calls and emails from the Fox News Channel host Jeanine Pirro requesting a hundred thousand masks be redirected to a hospital she favored; a lead on PPE procurement from Charlie Kirk, a Trump loyalist who founded Turning Point USA, a network of young conservative activists; and a lead from Tana Goertz, a former contestant on The Apprentice.

  Brad Smith, the deputy administrator at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, was a trusted ally of Kushner’s and took on a special assignment working with the volunteers. The CDC data modeled by Birx and Fauci suggested a far more catastrophic scenario than Kushner and other political advisers to Trump wanted to believe. Kennedy said Smith asked him and another volunteer to devise a new model.

  “I don’t know anything about disease modeling,” Kennedy told Smith.

  “That’s okay,” Smith said. “Just put a growth rate on it and make sure it ends up at the right numbers. It just needs to be a model that shows a worst case of one hundred thousand people dying and a low case of twenty thousand. Look around. Does it feel like two hundred fifty thousand people are going to die?”

  Kennedy recalled, “I was looking around like, I’m in a FEMA building, there’s military officers everywhere. To me, this feels pretty serious.”

  Smith disputed Kennedy’s description of their conversation. “The only model I asked the team to build in late March and early April 2020 was a model to project PPE needs through July 2020,” Smith said. “To calculate PPE needs, the model used hospitalizations and deaths as inputs. The mean version of the model assumed one hundred sixty-nine thousand deaths by July 2020 and the worst-case version of the model assumed three hundred twelve thousand deaths by July 2020. According to the CDC, there were approximately one hundred sixty thousand deaths as of July 30, so the model’s assumptions proved to be very accurate.”

  Three weeks in, Kennedy resigned, distressed and disgusted by his experience. He filed a whistleblower complaint to the House Oversight Committee, hoping that Congress might investigate what he saw as malfeasance on the part of Trump’s political appointees. Kennedy refused to follow through on Smith’s order, but political appointees cooked up a fatality model to satisfy Trump’s alternate reality. Unbeknownst to Birx at the time, Kevin Hassett, an economist who had served as Trump’s chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers until 2019, returned to the White House
with a special assignment: to work with a small team and quietly build an econometric model to show far fewer fatalities.

  Birx continued to toil in her windowless closet of an office on the ground floor of the West Wing, analyzing CDC data to present to the task force. But shortly after Trump agreed to extend the shutdown guidelines, Birx found her projections of rising numbers of infections and deaths undercut by the rogue Hassett model, which many in the White House interpreted to suggest the death toll would peak by mid-April and then drop off substantially. It was embraced by Kushner and guided the mindset inside the White House to prioritize the economy over public health. The Hassett model affirmed the skepticism of many of Trump’s political advisers of the severity of the virus.

  Meadows also routinely challenged Birx’s data analysis. “Debbie, I don’t know what this data is,” he said in a task-force meeting. “It seems specious to me.” Channeling Trump’s instincts to focus on the economy, the chief of staff argued, “We’ve got to get moving again. We’ve got to open things up.”

  Soon, Birx found her access to Trump cut off. She was no longer invited regularly into the Oval Office and was asked to brief Pence instead. Birx had a relatively productive relationship with Kushner, though in some meetings he aggressively challenged the veracity of her data and questioned her analysis, as if to suggest he knew more about infectious disease and epidemiology than she did. Frustrated by the office politics, Birx asked Grogan, one of the few White House officials she had known before the virus hit, what Kushner was really like.

  “Look, Debbie, he’s not like anybody you’ve worked with,” Grogan said. “He’s not like a four-star general who’s going to scream at you and call you ‘Sugar Tits’ and be a prick. He’s not like any asshole who lies and misrepresents data. He is a zero-sum-game motherfucker from New York. And if you can’t get your head around that, it is not going to go well for you.”