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

by Carol Leonnig

  That morning, Conley raised the public’s suspicion when he gave an astoundingly rosy summary of the president’s health. At a press briefing on the steps outside Walter Reed, Conley followed the Trump playbook by focusing on the positive and dodging questions that would reveal that the president’s health condition had initially been dire.

  “This morning, the president is doing very well,” Conley told reporters. “At this time, the team and I are extremely happy with the progress the president has made. Thursday, he had a mild cough and some nasal congestion and fatigue, all of which are now resolving and improving at this time.”

  He avoided answering some questions several times, including whether the president’s oxygen levels ever dropped, a frequent event in worrisome COVID-19 cases. Conley wouldn’t say. The skepticism about this dodge—and confusion—ratcheted up shortly thereafter when Meadows spoke to reporters and gave the opposite impression about Trump’s prognosis. “The president’s vitals over the last twenty-four hours were very concerning, and the next forty-eight hours will be critical in terms of his care,” Meadows said. “We’re still not on a clear path to a full recovery.”

  Later Saturday evening, a senior administration official confirmed to reporters that Trump had been given supplemental oxygen at the White House on Friday before going to Walter Reed. It confirmed something else: Conley had intentionally concealed the medical facts. Leaders from the medical community around the country were dismayed.

  “Saturday’s briefing by President Trump’s medical team was a deliberate exercise in obfuscation, insulting to the public and unbefitting the seriousness of the moment,” Dr. Leana S. Wen, who served as Baltimore’s health commissioner and was a visiting professor of public health at George Washington University, wrote in a Washington Post op-ed.

  That evening, the patient had the last word. A little after 7:00, Trump released a video recorded at Walter Reed in which he claimed he was on the mend. “I came here, I wasn’t feeling so well, I feel much better now,” Trump said. “We’re working hard to get me all the way back. I have to be back because we still have to make America great again.”

  The next day, October 4, Conley held another news briefing outside Walter Reed and admitted to having put a positive spin on Trump’s condition. The White House physician finally disclosed that on October 2 Trump’s oxygen level had dropped and that he received supplemental oxygen. Conley said he had not shared the information initially because he did not want to cause alarm.

  “I was trying to reflect the upbeat attitude that the team, the president, over his course of illness, has had,” Conley said. “I didn’t want to give any information that might steer the course of illness in another direction. And in doing so, you know, it came off that we were trying to hide something, which wasn’t necessarily true. . . . The fact of the matter is that he’s doing really well.”

  Conley’s reputation took an immediate hit. As one former colleague of his in the White House medical unit put it, “Oh, I don’t think he can come back from this. You’re a doctor; you just can’t slant the facts.”

  Every doctor owed their patients confidentiality about their medical condition, and the outsized stature and micromanaging nature of this particular patient further complicated things for Conley. Few knew the intense pressure Trump and his advisers were putting on Conley. The public expected honest information about the president’s health, but Conley was not allowed to say anything his patient did not authorize. So he was forced to dance around several details of his medical condition. On top of that, Conley genuinely felt upbeat, though he could not explain why. Before taking Trump to the hospital, Conley thought there was a high chance he could die.

  Conley called Redfield that Sunday to let him know the president was insisting he leave the hospital the next day. Redfield was a bit disturbed to hear this. He strongly urged Conley to find a way to keep Trump there a few more days. As a high school kid, Redfield had had a summer job as a janitor at Walter Reed back when it was called the National Naval Medical Center. From that cleaning job, he knew how enormous and well appointed the presidential suite was. Was there any harm for Trump in hanging there just a little while longer?

  “My patient wants to leave,” Conley said.

  Redfield told him all the medical reasons that it was a bad idea for Trump to leave, which Conley knew already. Redfield stressed that one never knew how well the monoclonal antibodies were going to work, and that a doctor needed time to monitor their effect. Also, he said clinicians had found that patients as old as Trump sometimes experienced the full effect of the virus after five to seven days, and they deteriorated very quickly. Redfield told Conley that leaving the hospital after three nights would be foolhardy.

  “It’s not going to happen,” Conley replied. “He’s going to do what he’s going to do.”

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  By that Sunday, his third day at Walter Reed, Trump had become bored. It wasn’t for lack of activity. He had frequent phone calls from well-wishers and the company of his medical and security teams and several aides, including Meadows and Dan Scavino. Trump was on a strict schedule, with his doctors and nurses giving him intravenous doses of remdesivir and popping in at least every two hours to check his oxygen level, blood pressure, and other vital signs. Outside the hospital, scores of supporters held up signs, waved flags, cheered his name, and honked car horns. More than anything, Trump wanted to project strength and vitality. He was annoyed with Meadows for telling reporters that his health readings were “very concerning,” worried the comment gave the impression he was feeble and bedridden. After he spoke on the phone with Rudy Giuliani, Jason Miller, and former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, the three said in media interviews that, yes, Trump was strong and ready to return to the campaign trail.

  In conversations with advisers from his hospital suite, Trump floated a theatrical idea to symbolize his strength, according to Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times. When he eventually was filmed leaving the hospital, he could appear frail at first only to then surprise television viewers by ripping open his button-down dress shirt and revealing a Superman T-shirt underneath. Trump also wanted to appear hard at work and posed for photos in his hospital room signing blank pieces of paper. In deference to Trump’s psychological need to always appear in complete control, Vice President Pence and military officials were notably quiet during his hospital stay. Nobody gave any public assurances that a plan was in place to ensure continuity of government should the president become incapacitated. They knew that even entertaining that notion would infuriate Trump.

  “You would want to hear the secretary of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the vice president say, ‘Look, we are going through a situation here. We have it well in hand. Make no mistake, our adversaries should not see this as an opportunity. We are fully prepared to execute all of our authorities,’ ” remarked David Lapan. But, he added, “the president doesn’t want to create an appearance that anybody is in charge except him.”

  Around lunchtime on October 4, while plotting with Meadows and Scavino, Trump decided to go for a joy ride. His Secret Service detail leader was alerted that they had an “off-the-record” presidential movement in the works.

  Trump teased his supporters that afternoon by sharing a video on social media hinting at his plans for an outing. After thanking the hospital staff, Trump said, “I also think we’re gonna pay a little surprise to some of the great patriots that we have out on the street, and they’ve been out there for a long time, and they’ve got Trump flags, and they love our country.”

  Just after 5:00, Trump delivered on his little surprise by riding in his motorcade past the clusters of supporters along Wisconsin Avenue outside Walter Reed. He waved to them from inside a souped-up and armored Chevrolet Suburban, rather than his one-of-a-kind limousine, the Beast. Inside the black vehicle were two Secret Service agents, dres
sed in masks, protective eye visors, and medical gowns. The agent driving had slowed the SUV to a crawl so everyone could get a good look at the masked commander in chief. Trump’s goal: to convince people that, despite everything, he was in good shape and still very much in charge. But the outing alarmed other Secret Service agents and medical professionals, who agreed Trump had improperly endangered the lives of his agents and others involved in the movement for what one physician called “political theater.”

  “He’s not even pretending to care now,” one agent said after the president’s jaunt.

  A former Secret Service member complained that someone should have stepped in to block this plan, if only to protect the president’s health. “Where are the adults?” the former agent asked.

  Chris Whipple, a student of White House management who published a history of chiefs of staff, pointed his finger directly at Meadows. “You have to wonder if anyone is performing that job, because no competent White House chief of staff would ever have permitted a president with a lethal disease to go take a joyride, thereby threatening the health of the Secret Service,” he told The Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey. “It’s just absolute chief of staff malpractice.”

  Dr. James Phillips, the chief of disaster medicine at George Washington University who also worked as an attending physician on a contract basis for Walter Reed, took to the president’s favorite medium to register his shock at this motorized jaunt.

  Phillips tweeted: “Every single person . . . in the vehicle during that completely unnecessary Presidential ‘drive-by’ just now has to be quarantined for 14 days. They might get sick. They may die. For political theater. Commanded by Trump to put their lives at risk for theater. This is insanity.”

  Two months later, Phillips would be told he was being removed from Walter Reed’s schedule starting in January 2021.

  While Trump was hospitalized, his advisers brainstormed how to leverage his situation for maximum benefit in the all-too-near election. As Tony Fabrizio’s polls had shown for months, Trump was trailing Joe Biden nationally and in many battleground states in large part because voters disapproved of his handling of the pandemic. Some of Trump’s advisers believed his illness, assuming he survived it, could in fact be a political blessing. Bill Stepien, Miller, Hicks, and a few others argued that by catching COVID-19, Trump now had a connection to the many who had suffered and could genuinely and personally testify to the magnitude of the crisis. And Trump’s very survival, despite his own comorbidities, could offer hope that the virus could be defeated. These advisers also came up with a watered-down alternative message that still could appeal to voters, should Trump not want to fully pivot from his defiant posture on the virus. Once again, however, Trump rejected the advice of his advisers. He was his own brain trust, and he thought the most important thing he could do was project strength. The president was egged on by others in his orbit—some of whom strategized about how his illness could be proof of his masculinity. They speculated among each other about how to show that, while Trump recovered quickly, COVID would have flattened Biden.

  One of the advisers who disagreed with this strength imperative thought, We’re not losing because people don’t think he’s strong enough. We’re losing because people think he doesn’t give a shit about them or anything but himself at this point.

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  On Monday, October 5, Trump got his wish. He was going home. “I will be leaving the great Walter Reed Medical Center today at 6:30 P.M.,” he wrote on Twitter. “Feeling really good! Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life. We have developed, under the Trump Administration, some really great drugs & knowledge. I feel better than I did 20 years ago!”

  Trump’s medical team backed up their patient. Despite the reservations he and Redfield had privately shared, Conley argued publicly that it was safe for his patient to return to the White House. He told reporters that “the president has continued to improve” and, importantly, that he had “met or exceeded all standard hospital discharge criteria.”

  “Though he may not entirely be out of the woods yet, the team and I agree that all our evaluations, and most importantly his clinical status, support the president’s safe return home, where he’ll be surrounded by world-class medical care 24/7,” Conley said. He added that considering Trump’s full cocktail of experimental drug therapies, “we all remain cautiously optimistic and on guard because we’re in a bit of unchartered territory.”

  Other doctors treating Trump also spoke at the news conference, including Dr. Sean Dooley, who detailed the president’s vital signs from that morning, all of them fairly encouraging. His temperature was 98.1, his blood pressure was 134 over 78, his respiratory rate was 17 respirations per minute, and his heart rate was 68 beats per minute.

  As Trump prepared to leave Walter Reed, he orchestrated another made-for-television performance to show strength. When Marine One touched down on the South Lawn of the White House at dusk to return the president home, Trump strode off the helicopter and across the lawn with purposeful vigor. He was wearing a dark suit and a blue tie and had a mask across his face. It was dusk. The president ascended the steps to the balcony, where four American flags had been erected. He stood to face the journalists and cameras recording the moment for history. Then Trump, appearing defiant and resolute, removed his mask, saluted, and flashed a thumbs-up.

  A film crew on the lawn down below recorded the act for use by Trump’s campaign. Later that night, the campaign released a slickly produced propaganda-style video of Trump’s dramatic return, set to triumphant orchestral music.

  Trump did not go through with the Superman T-shirt stunt he had considered. He later explained to us in the book interview that someone had given him an “incredible shirt,” but that he decided it could be disrespectful to people suffering from COVID to make light of his recovery. Still, he would revive the theme later that month once he resumed campaigning, referring to himself as “Superman” and inspiring chants from the crowd of “Su-per-man! Su-per-man!”

  Afterward, Trump tried to rub in the fact that he had donned a mask to the subset of his advisers—Jared Kushner, Fabrizio, and others—who had been pleading with him that summer to embrace masks as a means of expanding his political support. “See, I wore the mask like you wanted me to,” the president said teasingly to some of them.

  Trump returned to a White House ravaged by a virus outbreak, which many officials traced to the Barrett nomination event in the Rose Garden. Hicks did not attend the event, but spent considerable time in close proximity to Trump and others who had. The list of Trump aides and associates who tested positive around this time totaled more than thirty and included Bill Stepien; Kayleigh McEnany; Kellyanne Conway; Stephen Miller; Nick Luna, the president’s body man and director of Oval Office operations; Republican National Committee Chairperson Ronna McDaniel; Chris Christie; and Senators Ron Johnson, Mike Lee, and Thom Tillis.

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  On October 6, Trump settled back into a shortened workday as doctors continued to administer his treatments and monitored his recovery. Bill Barr broke the bad news to Meadows and Trump that John Durham’s probe into the origins of the FBI’s Russia investigation into Trump’s 2016 campaign was still ongoing and would not produce a report before the November election. The so-called October surprise Trump had imagined—dreaming of sending Obama’s intel chiefs or former FBI leaders James Comey or Andrew McCabe to jail—was not to be.

  For Barr, the lack of a public report was disappointing to say the least. After sixteen months of digging, Durham’s team had only a long plea agreement to show for its work. In it FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith admitted to altering an email that his department used to win court approval for a secret surveillance warrant on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Trump, who had been salivating in anticipation of some incriminating evidence about Comey or one of his other high-profile
enemies, didn’t know who Clinesmith was, and neither did most Americans. Barr had hoped this was simply an appetizer before the main course. He had believed one more person was likely to be charged, which would show deeper flaws in the origins of the investigation. But instead, Durham had encountered more problems.

  All spring and summer, Meadows had been pestering Barr to get Durham to speed up his work, and Barr had said he was cautiously optimistic there would be a report or some progress by the end of the summer. But when Labor Day rolled around, Barr had asked Durham if he could release a preliminary report they had discussed as a stopgap. Barr had not wanted to be boxed in by Justice Department policy barring public action or comment on politically sensitive cases in the run-up to elections. So, to keep his options open, he had earlier told reporters he didn’t feel compelled to follow those rules at that point, as Durham’s report would not have anything to do with Biden. Of course, the whole investigation was about vindicating the other candidate, Trump.

  Inside the Durham team, Barr’s pressure campaign had backfired. On September 10, Nora Dannehy, a well-respected prosecutor and Durham’s top aide, had resigned from the probe. A Harvard Law School graduate with decades of politically sensitive federal prosecutions under her belt, Dannehy lent considerable integrity to the probe. Her departure spurred a series of news stories reporting that part of her reason for leaving was dismay at what she considered constant pressure from Barr for a report during the heat of the campaign. Her resignation only intensified suspicion among Democrats that Barr was seeking to raise some preelection red meat for the boss to feed to his base.

  Barr was slow to realize the growing reluctance among some members of the Durham team to issue a report or take some public action before the election. Some had been unsettled earlier by what they considered Barr’s conclusive rhetoric. That spring, before the results of his department’s probe into the matter, he had preemptively called the Russia investigation “one of the greatest travesties in American history.” But there was a substantive reason in October that Durham himself concluded he couldn’t proceed with the report plan.