“Scott is a very famous man who’s also very highly respected,” Trump told reporters on August 16 when he announced Atlas’s hiring. “He has many great ideas and he thinks what we’ve done is really good.”
Atlas’s arrival was a watershed moment. Trump’s attendance at coronavirus task-force meetings had been declining, and he had been spending far less time with Fauci and Deborah Birx than in the spring, but after Atlas came aboard, the president stopped showing up altogether. Instead, Atlas briefed Trump personally on the pandemic. Robert Redfield complained to confidants that Atlas had effectively “iced out” the other doctors from meeting with Trump. Stephen Hahn, too, felt minimized by Atlas. But Birx bore the brunt of Atlas’s presence in large part because she was on the White House staff, while Fauci, Redfield, and Hahn all worked under the Department of Health and Human Services.
“He undermined Dr. Birx,” a senior White House official recalled, describing Atlas as a “blowhard” who would talk over Birx or try to correct her with a smug delivery. “He was sexist, insulting, condescending, and awful to her. He knew his only value added was he was seen as the right-wing, Fox-friendly version of a doctor and would push stuff that literally wasn’t credible. He wanted to scrap our testing strategy and scale it back significantly. He was a snake. He would work his way into the Oval and show up and put things in front of the president.”
Pence and Marc Short rationalized that if Atlas was going to be advising the president, it was better to have him attending task-force meetings than acting as an unguided missile on the outside. Atlas’s inclusion immediately created tension around the table. The infectious disease experts were incensed and insulted that a neuroradiologist had been given such prominence, and that he—and not they—was influencing the president’s thinking on the virus. Atlas had expertise in reading MRIs and X-rays, but not with contagious pathogens of any kind.
Atlas didn’t help matters by seeming to lord his special access to Trump over the other doctors. When he attended his first task-force meetings, Atlas would represent his ideas as official White House policy. He said things like, “This is our policy,” or “The president has said so,” or “I’m working on the president’s talking points.” The unmistakable takeaway was that Atlas was Trump’s quarterback on COVID-19.
The other doctors would debate Atlas on his rosy assessments about the virus, with Pence listening to both sides of the argument and presiding as chair. “But in the back of my mind, I’m thinking, ‘Does this really matter,’ because I think the president’s already made up his mind he was going to go with Scott Atlas,” one of the doctors recalled.
Atlas provided Trump something that Birx, Fauci, and Redfield refused to give him: happy talk about the virus gradually dissipating and life returning to normal. After months of health experts advocating lockdowns and talking about deaths, here was a doctor with a different and far sunnier perspective. Atlas was, as one senior adviser to the president put it, “Somebody, frankly, who had a doctor title but a MAGA perspective.” It was easy to see why the president was drawn to him.
At the time, more than 165,000 people in the United States had died from COVID-19, but predominantly in densely populated and urban and suburban areas, concentrated on the two coasts. Smaller communities across large swaths of the country had been relatively unscathed. But in summer, some sparsely populated states like South Dakota were hit with outbreaks for the first time. This was a sign that public behavior in places where residents had been resisting CDC guidelines for reducing the spread, such as social distancing and wearing masks, needed to change.
The other doctors privately scoffed at some of the claims Atlas had made on Fox and then repeated inside the White House. Atlas pushed, among other ideas, the controversial “herd immunity” strategy of letting the virus spread freely among young and healthy populations, whom he said could return to work and resume normal social behaviors, while protecting more vulnerable populations, such as the elderly and people with preexisting conditions. For instance, he argued that schools should reopen by falsely telling the president and members of the task force that young people had nearly “zero risk” of getting COVID-19.
“The science just got totally perverted with Scott in the room,” the senior adviser said. “You literally could watch him shrug his shoulders or flick his wrists when he talked about masks. His whole premise was, this is a fat, diabetic person’s disease.”
Other members of the task force described Atlas bringing falsehoods into the conversation and confusing those around the table, including Pence. Furthermore, one of these members said, Atlas was “single-minded in his efforts to do everything he could to disqualify Tony Fauci’s opinions on anything and had, as an ally, Mark Meadows, and the president.” Meadows had been a major skeptic of the CDC’s aggressive public health pronouncements when he was in Congress. As chief of staff, Meadows had installed Russ Vought—with whom he worked closely when he was on the Hill and Vought worked at the conservative Heritage Foundation—as the director of the Office of Management and Budget to review the CDC’s guidance to businesses and schools about steps to reopen. Vought initially held up the recommendations and defanged some before he would agree to its public release. Throughout the summer, Meadows worked tirelessly to align the government’s virus guidance with Trump’s claim that things were looking good, no matter the reality.
“Mark Meadows was the biggest ‘yes’ man to hold that position,” said one senior public health official. “That includes Nixon’s chief of staff, [H. R.] Haldeman, who went to jail. Even he’s not as bad as Meadows.”
Atlas was key to Meadows’s strategy. He had firmly established himself as a charlatan in the eyes of the other doctors. When they warned their White House contacts that Atlas’s claims lacked scientific backing, they were told Atlas was there not so much to shape epidemiological policy as to trumpet to the public that the threat of the virus was declining as the campaign entered its final months.
“They liked his message, which was, ‘You don’t have to worry about controlling the epidemic. Just let it run its course. Just isolate the real old people who are vulnerable. Let the economy roar. Don’t shut anything down. Just get the old people out of the way and just let it run its course,’ ” said a second top White House adviser.
In one of the first task-force meetings he attended, something Atlas asserted so assuredly struck the other doctors as being pulled out of thin air. He began explaining that the country was very close to herd immunity already—or surely would be—once 30 percent of the population became infected. At that level, he said, there would no longer be any risk of continued transmission nationwide. He said more kids needed to get exposed to reach the 30 percent threshold sooner.
“You see why we’re not seeing an increase in infections in these cities that were infected in February, March, April, and May?” Atlas said of early-hit cities on the East Coast. “It’s herd immunity.”
Birx, Fauci, and Redfield knew that theory was bunk. Most of the time, task-force discussions among the scientists were polite affairs. But both Redfield and Birx got heated when Atlas made this claim, wanting everyone watching to know how ardently they opposed him. Redfield didn’t shout, but he raised his voice to keep Atlas from interrupting him. He said that 85 to 95 percent of Americans were going to need to be immune before herd immunity influenced transmission cycles. Birx gave a blow-by-blow of why 30 percent immunity exposure would make little to no difference on transmission. Birx and Redfield both expected more waves of infections to come in those originally hard-hit cities, which indeed came to pass. But to Birx’s and Redfield’s surprise, Fauci was silent during Atlas’s presentation and the ensuing argument, sitting back with his arms crossed. After the meeting broke up, Fauci called Atlas, thinking there might be a chance to persuade him that his theory was wrong.
“Let’s talk about this herd immunity thing,” Fauci told Atlas. “Scott, you had places that went way up [in c
ase counts] and came down and then went way back up again, so how is that herd immunity?”
Atlas made clear his mind would not be changed. Later, Atlas would claim that he never advocated herd immunity as a response to the pandemic.
Redfield and Birx had wanted Fauci to confront Atlas in the meeting, but he opted not to. All three concluded that Atlas was a hopeless case and fixed in his ideas, but Redfield and Birx were frustrated that Fauci did not want to square off with him in task-force meetings.
Eleven
Fear and Fantasy
On July 30, President Trump proposed delaying the election, such was his fear of losing. He did not have the power to do so, but nevertheless tweeted, “With Universal Mail-in Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???”
The suggestion was laughable. The dates of presidential general elections are determined by the Congress, with power enshrined in Article II of the Constitution. Since 1845, federal law has set the Tuesday after the first Monday of November as the date of the election. In 2020, that would be November 3. No president in history has ever successfully delayed an election, not even in times of war.
More sinister, however, was Trump’s assertion that the election would be “the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history.” There was simply no basis for that statement. There was no evidence of meaningful voter fraud. And while U.S. intelligence agencies warned that Russia and other countries were attempting to interfere again in the presidential race, there was no indication they had the ability to tamper with voting machines or other election infrastructure to rig the results. At the White House, Trump’s aides didn’t take what he wrote seriously. They collectively shrugged their shoulders. They saw it as just another tweet that would evaporate.
“That’s one of those discussions of how many angels can sit on the head of a pin,” one senior White House official recalled. “Anybody who’s reasonable, who’s involved in it, gave it only a passing thought. Nobody gave it any serious consideration. Nobody. It was just a throwaway comment. It was, like, ‘Okay, noted.’ Nobody listened to that. Nobody cared about it. Nobody associated with it.”
Shortly thereafter, in early August, Trump snapped during a meeting with his campaign advisers. Tony Fabrizio was again presenting the president with poll numbers showing Joe Biden winning because independent voters had flocked away from Trump. Fabrizio believed these voters had reached a breaking point with Trump.
“Mr. President, just look at the data and you can see that the voters are tired,” Fabrizio said. “They’re tired of the chaos. They’re just fatigued. They’re really fatigued.”
The president jerked his head back and raised his voice.
“They’re tired? They’re fatigued? They’re fucking fatigued?” he asked his pollster. “Well, I’m fucking fatigued, too.”
The room fell silent for about ten seconds. Then they moved on to another subject. Trump, through a spokesman, denied saying this.
* * *
—
Trump’s difference of opinion with Bill Barr about the use of federal forces to quell civil unrest came to a head in dramatic fashion in August. He still felt stung by Barr’s resistance to his push to deploy troops in Seattle, and by being upstaged by the city authorities in clearing the protesters there. So he turned his ire south toward Portland. Earlier in the summer, the federal courthouse in Portland was the target of nightly assaults by vandals. And the presence of federal officers to protect the building became a magnet for protesters, drawing thousands of demonstrators against Trump and his administration.
In early August, the crowds shrunk considerably, and Barr was confident there were enough local, state, and federal resources in and around Portland to quell any violence. Yet Trump decided he wanted to deliver a message of power. He summoned Barr to the Oval Office. Trump told his attorney general that he didn’t understand why he couldn’t just clear the whole area out.
“Why aren’t we doing anything about it?” Trump asked.
Barr argued that scenes of unrest could play to Trump’s advantage in the campaign.
“It’s not like this is a bad thing for you politically because it highlights differences in policing,” Barr said.
Trump rejected Barr’s analysis, saying the administration needed to take action to stop the protesters and silence his critics.
“It makes me look weak,” the president complained.
Barr said the situation was trending toward a calm and controlled standoff. “Look, if it metastasizes and spreads and there’s a real issue, maybe we reevaluate how to handle it, but we think we’re in a pretty solid position in Portland,” he told Trump.
The president’s fixation on showing strength against civil unrest played on a loop for a few more rotations. He was sick of the wall of objections Barr was tossing up. He got red in the face and slammed his hand on the Resolute Desk.
“No one supports me,” Trump yelled. “No one gives me any fucking support.”
The president stormed out of the room, heading to his private dining room next door, where he liked to watch television. Barr glanced over at Mark Meadows and tried to offer some comic relief.
“Well,” he quipped, “that went well.”
* * *
—
In the first week of August, another senior administration official was wrestling with an announcement he felt he had to make—and one he knew would piss off Trump. As director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, Bill Evanina’s job was to brief Congress and the public on major disinformation campaigns and cyberattacks by foreign adversaries, as discovered by U.S. intelligence agencies. Earlier that summer, Democratic congressional leaders had accused Evanina of falling short of that responsibility. The accusation stung. Evanina began his job during the Obama administration and stayed on into the Trump administration. While his was a political appointment, Evanina considered himself an objective decades-long public servant.
Evanina knew that malevolent state actors—Russia especially, but also China—were working overtime to sow discord in the United States in 2020, on three simultaneous tracks: the pandemic, George Floyd’s killing, and the upcoming election. Russia was using the most active measures—internet trolls, proxies, and other social media tools—to amplify disagreements and conspiracy theories about the virus. They circulated pictures and memes that stoked fear and loathing of both protesters and police. Then came the evidence Russia was working to undermine Biden’s candidacy by portraying him as an ailing elderly man and his son Hunter as a thieving operator who made millions trading on his father’s office of vice president. Evanina had privately warned members of the congressional intelligence committees about these actions, and, on July 24, he released limited public information about foreign states’ goals in the upcoming election.
On July 31, in a private intelligence briefing with lawmakers, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi berated Evanina and told him he was failing the American people because his public statements were so vague as to be nearly meaningless. Pelosi and some of her Democratic colleagues insisted Evanina give the public more than euphemisms about “interference” and say which candidate Russia was really trying to torpedo.
Evanina believed he was boxed in. He wanted to share more information with the public about the U.S. intelligence community’s evidence of Russian interference, but he faced sizable, interlocking obstacles. First, some of the information remained classified. Second, some needed to be briefed to the president before it could be shared.
Trump’s briefers had increasingly played down the topic of Russia. When they tried to share with him evidence of Russian election interference, Trump had bristled, sometimes telling them they were wrong and shifting attention to other countries, like China,
Iran, and North Korea. Back in February, he had fired acting director of National Intelligence Joe Maguire when Maguire’s team had briefed Congress on intelligence about election interference, as was its legal responsibility, and explained that Russia had “developed a preference” for Trump winning reelection.
That summer, some of the obstacles Evanina faced in sharing the truth were lifted, including details of the Russian interference efforts. The intelligence community had evidence that Andriy Derkach, a member of the Ukrainian parliament, was a proxy whom Russian intelligence services used to promote and launder bogus stories about Biden to officials and reporters in the United States. One key American on the receiving end of Derkach’s misleading narratives was none other than Rudy Giuliani. Trump’s personal lawyer had met with Derkach in Ukraine in late 2019 and had been promoting Derkach’s information on conservative news outlets. He would later tell Trump he was working on an “October surprise” about Biden family corruption to boost the president’s campaign chances.
Evanina felt he could now tell the public more of what U.S. intelligence agencies knew about Russia’s campaign to hurt Biden’s candidacy. He was eager to refute the Democrats’ claim that he was doing Trump’s bidding by “soft-pedaling” intelligence.
Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe did not try to block Evanina. He just told him to get ready for incoming. Evanina understood, but he proceeded nonetheless, and he felt he had the full endorsement of CIA director Gina Haspel and FBI director Chris Wray. Evanina made his announcement on Friday, August 7, and included an obvious nod to the president’s sensitivities, by leading with China’s stake in the U.S. election, before describing Russia’s active interference. Evanina noted that intelligence showed the Chinese government considered Trump “unpredictable” and hoped he would lose. He said Iran also opposed a Trump presidency. Unlike Russia, however, China and Iran had not yet launched aggressive measures to hurt Trump. The media—and therefore the president—focused mostly on what Evanina said about Russia’s interference campaign. Evanina fully expected to be fired.
I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year Page 26
