Just after 7:00 that evening, the president was at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, where he held a hastily arranged news conference to tout falling unemployment numbers. He again vowed that the coronavirus was “going to disappear.” Asked about Evanina’s report, Trump at first said the intelligence could be true, but then dismissed the idea that Russia was rooting for him.
“I think that the last person Russia wants to see in office is Donald Trump, because nobody’s been tougher on Russia than I have, ever,” Trump said.
A reporter pointed out that U.S. intelligence agencies disagreed.
“I don’t care what anybody says,” Trump said.
Moments later, the president urged reporters to reconsider their emphasis on Russia.
“You started off with Russia,” Trump said. “Why didn’t you start with China?”
That night, Evanina was in a car traveling out of town for the weekend when a friend of his at the White House called.
“I just came out of a meeting. The president is probably going to fire you. It’s probably going to happen tonight,” the friend told him, saying it was expected after Trump’s news conference. “Don’t take it personally.”
Evanina and his wife were at peace with his likely ousting. They got ready for the Trump tweet. It never came.
Evanina instead took incoming from Democrats. On August 9, Pelosi gave interviews to CNN and Fox News arguing that the administration wasn’t telling the whole, unvarnished truth about Russia’s fervent efforts to secure a second term for Trump. She complained that it was entirely disingenuous to lump China, Iran, and Russia together when they were “not equivalent,” and Russia’s efforts were active and serious. And she criticized Evanina for not calling a spade a spade and stating clearly that Trump was Russia’s favored candidate.
“The American people need to know what the Russians are doing in this case and the American people believe that they should decide who the next president is, not Vladimir Putin,” Pelosi said on Fox.
The next day, Ratcliffe reached out to Evanina to tell him he could stop worrying about the president’s reaction. Trump’s anger apparently had not reached the level of firing the messenger. “I think you’re going to be good,” he said.
* * *
—
The morning of Tuesday, August 11, Trump summoned his law-and-order advisers to the White House. The president was incensed about fresh violence by protesters in Portland that weekend. Local police had declared a riot the previous Sunday night after protesters set fires near a police station, set off commercial-grade fireworks, and even used a mortar. Two police officers had sustained minor injuries and sixteen protesters had been arrested. Trump once again wanted to deploy the National Guard or a heavy federal presence to bring the protesters to heel.
The president’s team had grown so weary of this all-too-familiar desire. Barr might as well have trudged as he walked into the West Wing, that’s how fed up he was. Mark Milley and Stephen Miller were there, too. Mark Esper, who was taking a rare couple of days of vacation with his wife in Myrtle Beach, joined by phone. The president didn’t seem to understand that every time he suggested commandeering another state’s National Guard, which were under the control of their respective governors, he was proposing invoking the Insurrection Act. His advisers felt as though they had to explain this to him once more.
Barr did most of the talking; Esper had wanted Barr to take the lead because the military should be the course of last resort. Barr proposed that Trump let the team confer with local authorities and then come back to him with a strategy for restoring the peace that did not necessitate a massive federal force, which could appear heavy-handed considering the protest was still relatively small.
“I think it would backfire,” Barr told Trump.
Milley was unusually quiet in the meeting, but added his voice at that point to say he agreed with Barr. Eventually, Miller piped up to argue that there would be nothing wrong with a large show of force beating back a small group. He said something along the lines of, “If you only have a few demonstrators and you can handle them, just handle them and it will go away.
“Clearly the city has lost operational control of the situation,” Miller added, arguing for invoking the Insurrection Act.
Perhaps it was the number of times Barr had been summoned to the White House for this same discussion, or the number of times he had had to beat back the idea of military troops on American streets, but the attorney general cracked at Miller’s suggestion.
“You don’t know shit about what you’re talking about,” Barr said, his voice booming at Miller. “You have never had operational responsibility for anything. For every one of these that works there’s a Waco where people are killed.” He was referring to the 1993 siege on a religious sect compound in Texas by federal law enforcement and military forces that resulted in a fifty-one-day standoff and nearly eighty people dead.
“Look, we’re on the same side here,” Miller said to Barr. “We both want to find a way to end these things.”
The meeting ended not long after, with the president agreeing to wait to see Barr’s proposal.
* * *
—
After quickly consolidating power over the Postal Service by ousting longtime veterans from the institution’s leadership and replacing them with loyalists, Louis DeJoy achieved a breakthrough on August 1. More than six hundred massive mail-sorting machines, about 10 percent of those in operation, would be decommissioned starting that day. These machines that helped process the mail were shut down, disassembled, and removed from distribution centers.
It was normal for the Postal Service to decommission aging equipment, but the agency had never removed so many machines at once. Worse still, the changes were coming amid a pandemic, when staffing levels were inconsistent, and ahead of a presidential election expected to flood the Postal Service with tens of millions of ballots. The 671 machines to be removed were spread around the country, but located primarily in high-population areas, and together they had the capacity to sort 21.4 million pieces of mail per hour.
News of this move did not break until two weeks later, on August 13. That is when reporters learned of a formal grievance filed by the American Postal Workers Union sounding the alarm about the decommissioned machines. This was the only way that postal workers could speak out, because they were barred from discussing internal policy with the public.
The news became a major story that continued for days. Because Trump had been beating his drum to assail mail-in balloting—assuming more Democrats would vote by mail than Republicans and therefore the practice would benefit Biden—the union’s filing raised genuine fears that DeJoy was explicitly aiming to prevent votes for Biden from being counted on time.
On August 14, Pelosi and several other Democratic lawmakers wrote to DeJoy demanding answers to questions about “your policies and practices, the specific changes you are proposing, the rationale for those changes, and the potential impacts of those changes.” The Postal Service’s inspector general also launched an investigation into the complaints Democrats raised against DeJoy. The next day, more than one hundred protesters showed up on a Saturday to the lobby door of DeJoy’s apartment in Northwest Washington. Some stuffed phony ballots inside the gate.
On August 16, House Democrats called for DeJoy to testify before Congress. The House Committee on Oversight and Reform scheduled an emergency hearing for the next week, on August 24, to address whether the Trump administration was mucking up the gears of the Postal Service in order to slow down the delivery of mail-in ballots and affect the election. There also were concerns about prescription medications, Social Security checks, and other important items being delayed.
Voting rights activists accused DeJoy of disenfranchising voters with his handiwork. “The slowdown is another tool in the toolbox of voter suppression,” said Celina Stewart, se
nior director of advocacy and litigation with the nonpartisan League of Women Voters. “That’s no secret. We do think this is a voter-suppression tactic.”
On August 19, Pelosi spoke to DeJoy by phone to ask him point-blank what he was up to. She told reporters after the call that the postmaster general’s answers were unsatisfying. She said DeJoy “frankly admitted that he had no intention of replacing the sorting machines, blue mailboxes, and other key mail infrastructure that have been removed.”
Faced with the growing public outcry and the looming date of his congressional hearing, DeJoy said that week he was reversing course on some of the cost-saving measures. But when it came to DeJoy, Democrats had adopted a policy of don’t trust and definitely verify. Adding to the suspicion, emails later obtained by The Washington Post revealed that a top director of Postal Service maintenance operations instructed plant officials on August 18 that “they are not to reconnect/reinstall machines that have previously been disconnected without approval from HQ Maintenance, no matter what direction they are getting from their plant manager.”
Whatever the intent, the consequences of DeJoy’s moves were plain to see. The Postal Service’s general counsel sent letters to forty-six states and the District of Columbia warning that, given the high volume of mail-in ballots, it could not promise that every ballot cast by mail for the November election would arrive in time to be counted. Each state set its own rules for administering elections, including deadlines for sending and receiving absentee or other mail-in ballots. The Postal Service sent a separate and more urgent warning to forty states—which included such key battlegrounds as Florida, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—that their published timetables for voters to return completed ballots did not afford the Postal Service enough time to ensure their delivery. The bottom line: potentially tens of millions of voters were now at risk of not having their votes counted.
* * *
—
Since becoming his party’s presumptive nominee in April, Biden had struggled to generate excitement for his candidacy and to prosecute a compelling and comprehensive case against Trump. His lead in the polls was consistent and substantial, yet still most analysts believed his advantage was because of Trump’s mismanagement, ineptitude, and squandered opportunities, and not any affirmative steps Biden had taken. Most days, Biden could barely get any oxygen in the news cycle. Trump consumed it all.
Finally, in the third week of August, Biden had the nation’s attention. It was time for the quadrennial Democratic National Convention, originally scheduled to take place in Milwaukee but convened virtually to ensure health safety during the pandemic. The Democrats produced a slick spectacle that for four days straight laid out their case against Trump and for Biden as the healer the country needed to guide it out of crisis.
The convention program was full of cinematic imagery and contrasts. In this virtual format, the opening night’s roll call—traditionally a lively affair on the convention floor with each state’s delegation casting its votes for the nominee—became a captivating thirty-minute showcase of America’s rich diversity. A fisherman in Alaska, a fourth-generation family farmer in Kansas, a bricklayer in Missouri, a registered nurse in New York, and a calamari chef in Rhode Island all appeared on location.
The perfunctory speeches by politicians were choreographed to contrast with Trump and expand Biden’s coalition. John Kasich, the former Republican governor of Ohio, stood at a literal crossroads in his suburban Columbus neighborhood as he implored fellow Republicans to follow him in backing Biden. Washington, D.C., mayor Muriel Bowser, who had feuded with Trump earlier over the use of federal officers to clear protesters, spoke from a rooftop looking down on the gleaming yellow letters spelling out “Black Lives Matter” on Sixteenth Street in front of the White House. And former president Barack Obama spoke at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, standing against a backdrop of the Constitution itself as he denounced Trump as a threat to its principles.
“I never expected that my successor would embrace my vision or continue my policies,” Obama said. “I did hope, for the sake of our country, that Donald Trump might show some interest in taking the job seriously. That he might come to feel the weight of the office and discover some reverence for the democracy that had been placed in his care. But he never did.”
The most effective takedown of Trump, however, came from Michelle Obama. Beaming in from the living room of what appeared to be a vacation home on Martha’s Vineyard, the former first lady spoke calmly but passionately the night of August 17 about the dark state of the country. She exuded empathy and described a crisis of conscience and of competence.
“Let me be as honest and clear as I possibly can,” she said. “Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country. He has had more than enough time to prove that he can do the job, but he is clearly in over his head. He cannot meet this moment. He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us. It is what it is.”
“It is what it is.” Using Trump’s own words from an interview with Jonathan Swan of Axios a few weeks earlier, Michelle Obama painfully reminded viewers of Trump’s seeming indifference to the soaring COVID-19 death toll. As Washington Post columnist Robin Givhan wrote, “She sounded like a wounded citizen. She sounded like a woman in pain. By the end of her speech, her voice was breathy and her eyes began to shine, and it seemed as though she might cry. That she might weep for the future of her country if its citizens couldn’t roust themselves from these unfathomable lows and claw their way up toward the light.”
Trump needed to change the game.
* * *
—
The week of the Democratic convention, Francis Collins left town to recharge after a grueling few months running the NIH. He relaxed at a house on Chincoteague Island on Virginia’s remote Eastern Shore, a little slice of heaven a few hours from Washington known for its wild horses and undeveloped beaches. The NIH director’s tranquility was interrupted by a phone call on Wednesday, August 19. It was the White House. The president was on the other line.
Trump began by talking about how great his poll numbers were. This was hardly a concern for the NIH director, of course, never mind that the president’s numbers were actually quite low, as Trump’s own pollsters would attest. But Collins indulged the president by listening to his spiel. Then Trump changed gears. “You doctors are killing me,” he told Collins, according to the account he shared with aides. Trump veered into a tirade about the magical power of convalescent plasma treatments to save the lives of COVID-19 patients. He accused Collins and Anthony Fauci of blocking “what everybody knows” is a life-saving cure. He said they were getting in the way of his being able to announce that convalescent plasma could save lots of lives and they needed to “stop with this resistance.”
Collins and Fauci had indeed been blocking a major announcement on convalescent plasma treatment, a process by which antibody-rich blood—donated by people who had recovered from the virus—was given to people fighting an infection. FDA officials were preparing to grant emergency use authorization for the treatment, believing the available data showed there were minimal risks even though the benefits were not yet conclusive. But Collins and Fauci insisted upon collecting more data through clinical trials before the FDA approved its widespread use.
The disagreements had boiled over on a conference call of task-force doctors earlier that month. Stephen Hahn and Dr. Peter Marks, who ran the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, supported issuing an emergency use authorization, as did Robert Redfield and Deborah Birx. They thought that the plasma treatment might or might not provide a modest benefit, but it clearly met the very low standard of safety for an emergency use authorization. That bar required only that the treatment’s known and potential benefits outweighed the known risks.
Collins, and to a lesser degree Fauci, objected. Collins argued that by rushing a decision before additional data were collected, the admi
nistration was opening itself to criticism of having politicized the process. When Collins warned that the FDA would feel the wrath of the scientific community, Birx said, “Are you threatening the FDA?” Collins said he was not, but tensions persisted. Hahn and Marks decided to delay the authorization by a couple of weeks to gather more data, a decision Hahn later would come to regret.
On his August 19 call with Trump, Collins preached caution. “Mr. President, you don’t want to be in a situation where the FDA is pushed into granting an emergency use authorization without the evidence,” he said. “Remember what happened with hydroxychloroquine?”
That triggered Trump into another tirade about how hydroxychloroquine cured people, but the doctors got in the way of its approval.
“We are, right now, about a week away from having the data that I think we could really say is going to be convincing—or not, because it may turn out that this actually isn’t helping people,” Collins said.
“No,” Trump said. “You’ve got to have the answer by Friday. That’s it.”
Friday was two days away, and Trump kept up the pressure. He berated Hahn, accusing him of allowing government scientists—the president thought of them as “deep state”—to delay COVID treatments in order to hurt him politically. Meadows encouraged Trump, saying he was right to keep pressing, and that the scientists “need to feel the heat.” Meadows, as well as Adam Boehler, the close ally of Jared Kushner, also personally pressured Hahn during this period.
“You’re caving to pressure from the NIH,” Meadows told Hahn in one such conversation. “You’re allowing them to dictate what you’re doing.”
I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year Page 27
