WHITE HOUSE
What did Trump know and when did he know it?
Inside his Feb. 7 admission
Trump’s apparent recognition of the coronavirus threat
earlier in the crisis is triggering new charges that he lied to the public at a
critical moment.
New revelations from President Donald Trump’s
interviews with Bob Woodward early in the coronavirus crisis are raising a new
set of questions that are threatening to swamp his administration and campaign.
By NANCY
COOK, MERIDITH MCGRAW and ADAM CANCRYN
09/10/2020
09:17 PM EDT
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/10/trump-coronavirus-bob-woodward-412222
By the time
President Donald Trump privately told journalist Bob Woodward on Feb. 7 that
the coronavirus was “deadly stuff” transmitted by air, a threat “more deadly”
than the flu, the warnings around him had been rampant.
National
security adviser Robert O’Brien had told Trump that Covid-19 would be the
“largest national security crisis of your presidency.” Top trade adviser Peter
Navarro was drafting urgent pleas to manufacture more medical supplies and
personal protective gear in the U.S. Other worried senior aides were organizing
meetings about the potential severity and spread of a pandemic.
Yet Trump
continued to downplay the threat publicly — comparing it to the typical flu,
insisting the virus would disappear quickly and offering frequent praise for
China’s response. The president appeared committed to keeping the public
focused on more upbeat matters such as the rising stock market.
New
revelations from Trump’s interviews with Woodward early in the crisis are
raising a new set of questions that are threatening to swamp his administration
and campaign just over 50 days from the November election. While Trump keeps
trying to turn attention toward his favorite issues — culture wars, law and
order or new promises to his base like potential conservative judicial
appointees — Woodward’s book and the timeline it presents has forced the Trump
administration into precisely the position it’s wanted to avoid: litigating the
early stages of its response to a pandemic that has now killed more than
190,000 Americans.
Some White
House aides privately acknowledge it was a wasted month. Democrats and other
critics say the delay in giving out timely and clear information — especially
after those fateful days in early February — caused untold thousands more
deaths than necessary and deeper economic wreckage than the U.S. might have
endured if it had responded earlier.
“This is
the same man, Donald Trump, who for days, weeks, if not months thereafter calls
it a hoax, dismissed the seriousness of it to the point he suggested people
should not wear masks. He knew it was airborne, that people would breathe it,”
Democratic vice presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, said Thursday.
That early
response from Trump, top White House aides and health officials across the
administration now shows a different picture than the president was presenting
to the public. Senior administration officials argue they were all scrambling
to figure out the nature of the virus, with the severity of it slowly coming
into focus later in February.
During his
Friday night phone call, Trump unexpectedly kept bringing up the virus.
Woodward had initially asked Trump about his plans for the next eight to 10
months following impeachment, as he wrote in his book “Rage.” Trump turned the
conversation to the virus and displayed far greater technical knowledge of it
than he let on in public.
“You just
breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed,” Trump said in the Feb. 7 call.
“And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more
deadly than even your strenuous flus.”
Trump did
not share these growing concerns, or even basic public health guidance with the
American public at that time, preferring instead to present what he has called
a calm front.
“The fact
is, there has to be a calmness. You don't want me jumping up and down screaming
there's going to be great death. There's going to—. And really causing serious
problems for the country,” Trump told reporters in a White House press briefing
on Thursday as he defended himself from a growing furor over what his critics
decry as covering up a threat to American lives.
“When I say
it was airborne, everybody knew it was airborne. This is no big thing,” he said
moments earlier.
Here's what
happened in the White House in the days leading up to that phone call between
Trump and Woodward.
From ‘under control’ to ‘very tricky’
The gap
between the public and private messaging started weeks earlier. As soon as the
president returned from an economic conference in Davos, Switzerland, in late
January — where Trump dismissed concerns about the coronavirus and said “we
have it totally under control” — more than a dozen aides gathered in the office
of then-acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney to talk through the virus and chart
out the U.S. response.
In the days
leading up to the Feb. 7 call with Woodward, Trump’s health officials had raced
to get a handle on key elements of the emerging epidemic, including how quickly
the virus was spreading and by what means. Some had grown increasingly
concerned about the prospect of infected people with no symptoms passing on the
virus in greater numbers than initially anticipated.
The
coronavirus by early February had sickened more than 30,000 people in mainland
China and killed at least 600, an outbreak worrying enough that the White
House’s nascent coronavirus task force — launched in late January — had begun
regularly briefing Congress and the press on its progression.
Top
administration health officials largely sought to soothe the public, repeatedly
insisting that the “immediate threat” to the nation was low and encouraging
people to take only basic preventative measures. On Feb. 7, the U.S. had
identified just more than a dozen Covid-19 cases — only two of which were
people who had not just returned from China.
“Our goal
is to keep it that way,” CDC Director Robert Redfield said of the low case
count during a briefing that day, adding later that “the real threat to the
American public right now is the flu.”
It’s now
known there were already more cases in the U.S. — and it was coming from places
besides China. But the U.S. government was not looking for it, and the inept
start to testing haunts the U.S. response to this day.
Within the
administration’s new task force, officials were similarly focused more on the
conditions abroad. The group led then by HHS Secretary Alex Azar had
prioritized imposing new screening measures at airports and rushed to
quarantine those returning from hard-hit Chinese provinces, hoping to prevent
infection from circulating more broadly throughout the country.
Top
infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci in late January had initially
downplayed the possibility of asymptomatic cases becoming a major driver of the
virus’ spread, citing the experience of past respiratory outbreaks. But by Feb.
7, health officials had grown far more cautious as more asymptomatic reports
around the world began to emerge. “We are working as quickly as possible on the
many unanswered questions about this virus,” HHS Secretary Alex Azar said at
the time. “That includes exactly how it spreads, how deadly it is, whether it’s
commonly transmitted by patients not yet displaying symptoms.”
Shortly
afterward, Redfield offered a blunter view, telling reporters that it was “very
clear that individuals that don’t have symptoms can in fact transmit the
virus.” (The CDC offered stark warnings that month, with one top official on
Feb. 25 saying “disruption to everyday life might be severe” — a statement that
drew a backlash from Trump himself and marked the end of briefings at the CDC
for months.)
Trump defeats the ‘political hoax’
During that
week of Feb. 7, Trump at least publicly appeared to be consumed by other
matters at the White House.
He
delivered a Hollywood-worthy State of the Union address on Feb. 4, with
surprise guests and the awarding of the U.S. Medal of Freedom to controversial
conservative radio talk show host, Rush Limbaugh.
The Senate
acquitted him on two articles of impeachment on Wednesday, Feb. 5., a move that
emboldened him to strike down and fire critics and remake the administration
even more to his liking.
“My
recollection of that whole period, what a colossal waste of time impeachment
was,” said Joe Grogan, the former assistant to the president for domestic
policy who ran the Domestic Policy Council. “The Democrats should hang their
heads in shame on a total goat show. They were briefed on Covid, too, and if they
want to bitch and moan the president was not paying attention, he was paying a
hell of a lot more attention than they were.”
Feb. 7 was
a busy Friday for the White House with the president eager to continue his
post-impeachment victory lap. Trump left a rainy Washington mid-morning to
deliver a speech in Charlotte, N.C., on the economy and Opportunity Zones.
But first
he walked over to reporters outside the White House holding a stack of papers
he declared was an important decision by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to
throw out emoluments claims against Trump and his hotel.
“I'll be
reading it on the helicopter, but it was a total win,” Trump said. “It was
another phony case.”
Trump
railed against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who ripped up his State of the Union
speech, and accused her of breaking the law. He called his impeachment trial a
“political hoax” and bragged about the monthly job numbers.
Amid internal worries, Trump praises China
Internally
at the White House, some officials were asking questions about a lack of
information about how much personal protective equipment was available in the
United States. In a series of memos to the Task Force days later, beginning on
Feb. 9, Navarro requested immediate action on N-95 mask production, the use of
remdesivir as a possible therapeutic, and the need of a “Manhattan Project”
effort towards vaccine development.
At the
time, several White House aides dismissed Navarro’s memos as overly dramatic —
though now, they look more prescient.
“The
Never-Trumpers in the media are both misreading the Woodward book and missing
the president’s strategy,” Navarro told POLITICO. “Through mid-March, China was
hiding critical information.... In this fog of China Virus war, the president’s
clear strategy was ‘hope for the best, prepare for the worst, stay calm, and
attack the virus.’”
Although
top national security advisers, health officials and Navarro recognized the
seriousness of the virus, the lack of a clear policy making process bedeviled
the response, and members of the coronavirus task force, then run by HHS chief
Azar, were chafing under Azar’s leadership. Vice President Mike Pence later
replaced him as the head of the task force.
“We weren’t
running a normal process,” a former administration official recalled. “It’s
like you practice all year for the big football game and you have these plays
you know will work and run all year, and practice, practice, practice, but then
it’s the fourth quarter, the game is tied, you have three minutes to win and
you start making up plays on the fly. You put random players in. Your star
quarterback who has been throwing the ball all year sits on the sidelines. What
are we even doing? We panicked.”
The focus
of the U.S. response was elsewhere. During those first days of February, in one
of the administration’s biggest actions of the week, the State Department
announced it had rushed nearly 18 tons of privately donated medical supplies to
China — a haul that included the kinds of masks, gloves and protective
equipment that the U.S. itself would find itself sorely needing just weeks
later.
Yet even as
top officials projected confidence, that first week of February left some in
the administration unsettled over what they did not yet know for sure about the
virus. China had continued to withhold permission for a visit from a global
team of health experts that the U.S. saw at the time as crucial to better
understanding the brand new virus — a stalemate that health officials had
already spent weeks trying to break.
Toward the
end of Trump’s gaggle with reporters, before he turned away to board Marine
One, a reporter asked him to answer a question on China.
“Are you
concerned that China is covering up the full extent of the coronavirus?” A
reporter yelled through the hum of the chopper.
“No. China
is working very hard,” Trump said, and recounted his conversation the night
before with Chinese President Xi Jinping. “They're working really hard, and I
think they are doing a very professional job.”
The
president brushed off a question about whether he had any concerns about the
potential impact on the global economy.
“I think
that China will do a very good job,” Trump said.
The
exchange demonstrated the extent to which the president wanted to preserve his
warmer relationship with China despite the warnings being delivered from some
of his top advisers. Only weeks before, the president signed a truce he called
a “sea change in international trade” that reined in a trade war between
Washington and Beijing that lasted over 18 months.
Just the
day before, the physician who first raised alarms about the coronavirus in
Wuhan, Dr. Li Wenliang, died of the disease, as well as a U.S. citizen in
Wuhan. And top officials scrambled to evacuate more American citizens from
Wuhan to Travis Air Force Base in California where they were forced to
quarantine.
Payback?
Once he
returned from North Carolina, Trump’s focus remained on cleanup inside his
White House on another matter.
That night,
Trump swiftly — and unexpectedly — removed two of the most prominent witnesses
in his impeachment trial. Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a National Security
Council staff member, was escorted off White House grounds and Gordon Sondland,
a donor turned ambassador to the European Union, was pulled from his post.
Reporters
called out questions about “retaliation” and “payback” as the president
returned from his trip.
Trump
flashed a thumbs up.
Then he
headed into the White House, where he later made his call to Woodward.
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