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

by Carol Leonnig

  Redfield was clear that he didn’t think the virus was released intentionally or deployed as a weapon but was unshakable in this belief that the lab was the coronavirus’s epicenter: “It unintentionally escaped, probably by infecting laboratory technicians.”

  The origin of this potent virus would remain a mystery throughout the year. Many experts dismissed the lab-leak theory as highly unlikely, while a growing number of American and European scientists insisted it had never been properly investigated. Two profound failures prevented the world from knowing the answer about the origin. First, the Chinese government dissembled and tried to keep anyone outside the country from looking closely. Secondly, the Trump administration let China get away with that. This second flaw showcased Trump’s consistent focus on optics over facts. His administration primarily deployed the lab theory as a useful anti-China talking point, a convenient boogeyman, rather than a hypothesis that required rigorous stress-testing and unimpeachable data. In the early days of the outbreak when it mattered most, the U.S. president did not demand that a CDC team be allowed into Wuhan to conduct an independent investigation that could have ruled a lab accident in or out. Trump was too busy touting his “great” relationship with President Xi Jinping and their trade deal. Even when Trump was later personally rebuffed in seeking to send in investigators, he still took no action to punish China or hold it to account.

  * * *

  —

  Through late March and early April, the president heard a steady drumbeat of anecdotal testimony that the untested, antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine could treat COVID-19. The evangelists in his ear ranged from Rudy Giuliani to Ingraham, who, with Meadows’s help, arranged to bring doctors who were regular on-air guests on her Fox show to the White House for private meetings with Trump to talk up the drug.

  Hydroxychloroquine was still in the testing stages and not yet approved by the FDA as a treatment for COVID-19, although doctors were permitted to prescribe it to hospitalized patients. Medical professionals believed it had dangerous side effects, and Fauci privately pleaded with the president to be more cautious about advocating the drug. But Trump, who famously said he trusted his gut more than anything an expert could counsel him, was so desperate to make the virus disappear that he pitched the drug as “a very special thing.”

  “What do you have to lose?” the president asked again and again.

  Doctors around the country watching the president’s reckless promotion were stunned. If he wasn’t the president, they noted, he could be prosecuted for off-label promotion of a drug—pushing a medicine for an unauthorized and not fully tested use. In the pursuit of FDA emergency use authorizations for hydroxychloroquine and other therapeutics, Meadows was Trump’s enforcer. He regularly browbeat Hahn, demanding to know why data from the clinical trials was not yet available. He wanted results immediately, and applied pressure on the FDA chief to speed up the process.

  “We’ve got to get it done,” Meadows would tell Hahn. “You’re not working fast enough.”

  Hahn would explain that it took months to complete clinical trials and get data. What’s more, the FDA was concerned that with so many hospitalized COVID patients taking hydroxychloroquine, there was a sudden shortage of the drug for people with lupus, for which hydroxychloroquine was an approved treatment.

  Hahn was concerned about how political the hydroxychloroquine debate had become and worried it was a dry run for the pressure he fully expected to receive from Trump and Meadows to speed up FDA approval of vaccines before the election. He and Caputo went on walks along the National Mall to talk through the personalities and politics involved. They both agreed that if the White House tried to manipulate the FDA during the vaccine approval process, government scientists would sooner climb to the roof at the FDA’s White Oak offices in suburban Maryland and light themselves on fire than take a political action. As Caputo joked with Hahn, “None of those electric cars in the parking lot at White Oak have Trump bumper stickers.”

  On April 13, Azar entered Meadows’s office for a meeting and found him waving a spiral-bound report and yelling. “If this goes out, the president will fire you,” Meadows said.

  The report had been prepared by the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which Fauci ran. It urged that there be Phase Three clinical trials of therapies, including hydroxychloroquine, that Trump wanted authorized immediately as miracle cures. Clinical trials would take time—time that Trump considered unnecessary and wasteful. Azar defended the multistage trials, explaining that the government endorsement of such therapies should rightly come only after thorough research on benefits, side effects, and unusual reactions. There was alarm in the scientific community that hydroxychloroquine, when combined with azithromycin, could cause heart arrhythmias.

  “The president wants this now, Alex,” Meadows said. “It works.”

  A senior member of the task force observed, “Meadows was so consistently abusive, so dismissive of the medical professionals—repeatedly. They deserved to be challenged and questioned, but kicking the shit out of them for your own amusement and trying to browbeat them was so counterproductive, and it was just an absolute disaster over time.”

  Providing backup was Peter Navarro, the zealous trade adviser who had concluded that Hahn and the other task-force doctors had “hydroxy hysteria.” So he joined a task-force meeting around this time to try to strong-arm a consensus on approving hydroxychloroquine. Navarro arrived in the Situation Room with a stack of papers that he said were nearly two dozen retrospective reviews of hydroxychloroquine as a COVID treatment. Other officials questioned the credibility of the writings and noted that some were from Chinese doctors.

  Navarro handed Hahn the papers. “Look, this is not high-level evidence to support what you want to do,” Hahn said. “We have to wait for the clinical trials to be done.”

  “I know the literature,” Navarro said. “This is highly supportive.”

  Fauci jumped into the conversation to back up Hahn and explain that the evidence thus far was inconclusive. At that, Navarro challenged Fauci’s medical credentials and argued that he was the only task-force member who had read all of the studies about the drug.

  “You have blood on your hands,” Navarro told Hahn and Fauci, charging that many more Americans would die if they did not immediately approve hydroxychloroquine.

  The argument escalated until Pence put an end to it and the meeting broke up. Hahn’s and Fauci’s instincts proved right. On April 24, the FDA would caution against using hydroxychloroquine for treatment of COVID-19 because of the risk of “serious heart rhythm problems.” And on June 15, the FDA would revoke its emergency use authorization because it was no longer believed to be effective against COVID-19.

  * * *

  —

  When Birx began work in March, she drew up a list of her top ten scientific questions about the coronavirus that she wanted to be able to answer for the public. One of them was simple: Does the virus still spread on surfaces outdoors? Scientists at the Department of Homeland Security set about trying to find Birx an answer. They tested different disinfectants outdoors, timed sunlight exposures, and tried to see how long the virus would last on an outdoor surface that people touch but that is blocked from sunlight, such as the undersurface of a swing set.

  The answer came on April 23, when one of the DHS scientists, William Bryan, came to the White House to brief the task force on their preliminary findings. He said the life span of droplets containing the virus was shorter when exposed to sunlight or heat, such as summer weather, and that it would be more practical for the government to encourage people to be active outdoors, though he cautioned that there was no proof that the virus was less contagious or spread less aggressively in warmer climates.

  After the task-force meeting broke up, some advisers went to the Oval Office to meet with Trump before his daily news conference. (Birx, who by then was cut out of mo
st Oval meetings, went to her downstairs office.) They brought Bryan with them, figuring the president would be interested in hearing what he had to say. Indeed, he was—so much so that Trump asked Bryan to join him at the press briefing.

  As officials lined up to get ready to walk into the briefing room, Bryan spotted Birx and told her he got to go into the Oval. “It was really exciting,” he said. “The president thinks this could be a treatment,” meaning sunlight. Trump, Birx, and Bryan stepped into the briefing room, and Bryan presented his findings. Then Trump ruminated aloud about the presentation, as if he were conversing with Bryan, only live on television with millions of Americans watching.

  “So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it,” Trump said. “And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do, either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that, too. Sounds interesting, right? And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because, you see, it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that.”

  Birx, seated alongside the podium, looked uncomfortable and slightly distraught as Trump mused about injecting a household disinfectant such as bleach into the human body. She smirked at first and then stared down, trying to keep a straight face. She later told confidants she felt as if the earth had swallowed her up. This cannot be happening, she thought to herself. It was not in Birx’s DNA to stand up and yell, “This is not a treatment! Do not inject bleach!” So Birx sat silently, declining to correct the president. She was, after all, an army doctor—a “chain-of-command gal,” as she liked to tell people—and Trump was her commander in chief.

  After the news conference ended, Birx unloaded on Trump’s aides. She was screaming, crazed about how Bryan was even allowed into the Oval in the first place. “Who let [Bryan] see the president?” she asked them. “Who let him in there?”

  Olivia Troye couldn’t believe the president would suggest on national television during a pandemic that people inject themselves with bleach and it might make them immune from the virus. “I remember walking away from that moment and thinking, Tonight there is going to be some family probably somewhere who’s going to [inject bleach] because they believe everything he says,” Troye later recalled. “Some of his supporters are loyal, unwavering people. And God, I hope tonight there isn’t a family out there somewhere who actually does this.”

  Another member of the task force recalled thinking, “I don’t know what the fuck was going through his head. It was inconceivable that the president believes you can shoot yourself up with disinfectant. Was he tired? Was he misspeaking? Did he use the wrong word? He said he was being facetious. He told me privately, ‘I was being facetious.’ I don’t believe that’s true.”

  The bleach moment went viral and was held up across the media as an example of Trump’s willingness to spread misinformation about the pandemic. The president had a communications crisis. For weeks now, Trump’s daily news conference performances had been erratic, combative, grandiose, and, yes, saturated with falsehoods. His political advisers had come to believe that they were hurting him in the polls.

  “We’re in a global pandemic,” Conway told Trump during this time. “People are watching. It’s become must-see TV. But not because you’re sparring with the press. It’s must-see TV because people want information. They have information underload when it comes to the pandemic.”

  Conway warned Trump his daily performances could swing the election. “We get you two hours a night and we get an hour a week of Joe Biden,” she told the president. “That’s good for Joe Biden.”

  A coordinated procession of Trump allies visited with the president around this time to implore him to change his tune or risk losing reelection. Among them was Republican senator Lindsey Graham, arguably Trump’s closest friend in the Congress, who himself was facing a tough reelection challenge in South Carolina.

  “Mr. President, it’s not working,” Graham told Trump, referring to the daily briefings. “You’re getting too combative. You’re getting in pissing contests with thirty-five-year-old reporters. And that’s not helping you. You were very reassuring at first and then you got to be in competition—‘We’re doing better,’ ‘Our numbers are better than Europe,’ ‘I’m doing a great job,’ versus, ‘The country is suffering.’ ”

  Bleach day was the breaking point. Parscale called Kushner and said, “We’re going to lose in a landslide. You’ve got Doctor Trump up there all day. We’re still going down in the polls. We’re losing and nothing’s changing.”

  “I know,” Kushner replied. “This is horrible.”

  This turned out to be Trump’s final time answering questions at a coronavirus news conference for a while. Starting April 24, when the U.S. death toll reached fifty thousand, Trump attended the news conference and made brief remarks. “Our country is a great place and it’s going to be greater than ever before,” the president said. Earlier in the day, he signed the Paycheck Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act, which provided $320 billion for businesses harmed by the shutdowns to keep employees on payroll. These programs were created as part of the historic $2.2 trillion coronavirus relief package Trump signed in late March. When it came time for reporters to ask questions, however, Trump turned the show over to Pence and Hahn. Finally, he had heeded his advisers’ advice to pare back his briefing room performances.

  As one of Trump’s advisers later explained, “He’s a poor communicator to the public. He makes it about him, and it can’t be. All he had to do to win the election was if he walked up to a glass wall at a hospital and said, ‘I’m America’s president. The whole force of the United States government is behind you. I’ll do everything I can do to save lives.’ A little teary-eyed, and he’d win the election. But he said, ‘No, no, this isn’t true.’ ‘There’s a miracle drug.’ ‘We’re all going to survive.’ ‘Let’s open the country.’ ”

  “Even if that’s right,” this adviser continued, “you don’t fucking say that.”

  Six

  Refusing to Mask Up

  Bill Barr is a political junkie. He studied campaigns and voters’ attitudes closely. As spring wore on, he came to believe that President Trump was squandering his hopes for reelection. It felt all too familiar. He had experienced this same premonition of an election slipping away when he had been attorney general in the final year of George H. W. Bush’s presidency. Barr had no role in the coronavirus response, but he was fed up watching Trump’s undisciplined press briefings and ad hominem attacks, and knew they were damaging his popularity among voters otherwise inclined to support him.

  Barr had come out of a comfortable and easy semiretirement to work for Trump, vowing to give him the solid advice he badly needed and to do his bit to keep the Republican Party in charge of the executive branch. Like many Trump appointees, Barr had taken a personal and professional beating for decisions he made in service to the president. Like a receiver, he didn’t mind getting tackled after catching the ball for another first down. But Barr didn’t appreciate having taken these hits only to watch Trump fritter away these advantages. As he confided privately to his advisers, Trump seemed programmed for overkill. “He’s never had a good hand he didn’t overplay,” Barr told them.

  In April 2020, Barr decided to make the most of his standing as the rare Cabinet member to talk straight to the boss—to tell Trump he was losing, which Lindsey Graham and a few other trusted allies also did that month. Barr scheduled a meeting with Trump in the Oval Office, just the two of them alone. He wanted a truly private conversation.

  Barr opened the discussion with a plea for patience, hoping to short-circuit Trump’s
standard soliloquy at the start of every meeting. “Mr. President, I have something very important I want to talk to you about, and I’m hoping you actually listen to what I have to say,” Barr said, according to the account he shared with confidants.

  “Okay,” Trump said, a bit taken aback.

  “I feel you are going to lose the election,” Barr said. “I feel you are actually losing touch with your own base.”

  Barr explained that in his travels around the country, he had talked to a lot of people in law enforcement and other solid Trump supporters who were uncomfortable with the president’s focus on skewering his perceived enemies rather than on clear, consistent plans to steer the country safely through the pandemic and shore up the economy.

  “I have yet to meet anybody who supports you who hasn’t said to me, ‘We love the president, but would you please tell him to turn it back a bit?’ ” Barr said. “You’re going to lose because there’s going to be enough people who otherwise would vote for you who are just tired of the acrimony, the pettiness, the punching down and picking a fight at every moment, and the apparent chaos, and they’re just going to say, ‘We’re tired of this shit.’ ”

  Barr warned Trump that he risked turning off some of his 2016 backers—enough to lose the election, especially with Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee.

  “You’re trying to jack up your base, but you can jack up your base without pissing off this important segment,” Barr said.

  Barr explained that Trump had won the 2016 election narrowly, in large part because he had been scared straight one month before the election by the release of the shocking Access Hollywood recording in which he bragged that his celebrity status gave him the power to sexually assault women. Republican officials, including then party chairman Reince Priebus, predicted he would lose badly, and Trump became convinced to stick to a disciplined script crafted by Kellyanne Conway and strategist Steve Bannon, among others.