Rage

by Bob Woodward

Evelyn M. Duffy

Steve Reilly

“This will be the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency,” Robert O’Brien, the national security adviser, told Trump, expressing a jarring, contrarian view as deliberately and as strongly as possible.

Beth Sanner,

Matt Pottinger,

“Don’t think SARS 2003,” the expert replied. “Think influenza pandemic 1918.”

The so-called Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide with about 675,000 deaths in the United States.

To Pottinger, these were the three alarms of a three-alarm fire.

People could not travel within China, say from Wuhan to Beijing. But they had not cut off travel from China to the rest of the world, including the United States. That meant a highly infectious and devastating virus was probably already silently streaming into the U.S.

Several Chinese elites well connected with the Communist Party and government signaled that they thought China had a sinister goal: “China’s not going to be the only one to suffer from this.”

If China was the only country to have mass infections on the scale of the 1918 pandemic, they would be at a massive economic disadvantage.

Most likely the outbreak was accidental. But he was certain the United States was in for an unparalleled health onslaught. And China’s lack of transparency would only make it worse. With SARS the Chinese had egregiously concealed the outbreak of a dangerous new infectious disease for three months.

January 31,

When the highly infectious respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus, known as Covid-19, did come up in settings where he had an opportunity to reach a large number of Americans, Trump continued to reassure the public they faced little risk.

This is something that is a low-risk, we think, in the U.S.”

February

About halfway through the lengthy speech, Trump mentioned coronavirus in one short paragraph. “Protecting Americans’ health also means fighting infectious diseases.

“My administration will take all necessary steps to safeguard our citizens from this threat.”

“I wanted to always play it down,” Trump told me. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”

Trump called me at home about 9:00 p.m. on Friday, February 7, 2020.

“I think that that goes away in two months with the heat,” Trump said. “You know as it gets hotter that tends to kill the virus. You know, you hope.”

“It goes through air,” Trump said. “That’s always tougher than the touch. You don’t have to touch things. Right? But the air, you just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed. And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus.”

At this point I also was not aware O’Brien had told the president that the virus “will be the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency.” I’d heard no one calling for any change in Americans’ behavior other than not traveling to China. Americans went about their daily lives, including more than 60 million who traveled by air domestically that month.

“This is deadly stuff,” Trump repeated. He praised President Xi. “I think he’s going to do a good job. He built a number of hospitals in record-setting time. They know what they’re doing. They’re very organized. And we’ll see. We’re working with them. We’re sending them things, in terms of equipment and lots of other things. And the relationship is very good. Much better than before. It was strained because of the [trade] deal.”

Trump in the White House, had been published 17 months before this February 7 phone call. Fear described Trump as “an emotionally overwrought, mercurial and unpredictable leader” who had created a governing crisis and “a nervous breakdown of the executive power of the most powerful country in the world.”

“Let’s hope to God we don’t have a crisis,” I said.

Trump had declined to be interviewed for Fear but regularly told aides he wished he had cooperated. So for this book he agreed to be interviewed. By February 7, we were on our sixth of what would be 17 interviews.

Instead of being his usual upbeat, cheerleading or angry self, the president sounded foreboding, even unconfident with a touch of unexpected fatalism.

“Boeing happens, as an example.

“General Motors goes out on strike,” Trump said, giving another example.

“There’s dynamite behind every door” seemed the most self-aware statement about the jeopardy, pressures and responsibilities of the presidency I had heard Trump make in public or private.

James Mattis

He was fired by Obama due to his aggressiveness toward Iran when Obama was negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran.

General John Lejeune,

“You don’t always control your circumstances, but you can control your response.”

“If you want to understand Russia, they haven’t changed much culturally in 1,000 years. They are the most fatalistic people on the face of the earth, which is why they’re willing to live under lousy leaders. If you ask them about it, they’d say they don’t like it, but they’d say ‘Das Russia’—‘That’s Russia.’ They’d shrug their shoulders. I would talk to my Russian employees about it. Only one time did Russians rise up in revolution. And that didn’t turn out so well. So they look back on that and they say, Don’t do that again.”

Putin has a goal for Russia, Tillerson said. “They want recognition of their role in the global order. And Putin wants respect as a leader of a great country. We’ve never been willing to give him either.

“China is a different challenge for you. On the one hand, China’s rise, their economy, the lifting of 500 million people out of poverty to middle-class status, all of the economic benefits to the rest of the world—those are all good things.

“Russia is an immediate challenge to you. China is a long-term challenge.”