Rage

by Bob Woodward

“This thing is a nasty—it’s a nasty situation,” Trump told me about the coronavirus on March 19, 2020.

“I think we’re doing very well,” the president said. “We have to see what happens. We have it very well shut down. The American people are terrific. You know, what they’re putting up with.”

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

“You know the news conferences I’ve been doing on a daily basis, because I think it keeps people informed and it’s been good, they’ve gotten very good reviews but they’ve also gotten unbelievable ratings,” he said.

Kushner broke the news about the ventilators to Trump, who later called it the scariest day of his life and said he told the team to “move heaven and earth” to get the ventilators.

Kushner’s team predeployed ventilators so that every time they got to about 96 hours away from running out, they sent them another 500. New York and New Jersey came close a few times on ventilators.

“Well nobody knew that a thing like this could happen,” Trump said. “The best decision I made was Europe and China, closing our doors. We would’ve had a much bigger problem, like many times bigger than we had. We would’ve had unbelievable amounts of death.”

Fauci said modeling showed the U.S. could be in excess of a million cases and deaths could exceed 100,000 without mitigation efforts. “I mean, you could make a big sound bite about it, but the fact is it’s possible,” Fauci said. “What we’re trying to do is not let that happen.”

Trump seemed to be on a war against rules. On April 3, when the CDC issued new guidance recommending that Americans wear masks, Trump said at the Coronavirus Task Force briefing that day, “This is voluntary. I don’t think I’m going to be doing it.” The death toll in the United States had reached 7,000 and the number of new cases was rising by a staggering 30,000 each day. “I’m feeling good,” Trump added later in the briefing. “I just don’t want to be doing—I don’t know, somehow sitting in the Oval Office behind that beautiful Resolute Desk—the great Resolute Desk—I think wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens, I don’t know. Somehow, I don’t see it for myself.”

“The question is, are you happy?” I asked about the scope of the federal government’s response. On testing, “Is it enough?” He did not answer. The Democratic governors, he said, would not give him enough credit in public.

In public, Fauci did play down the severity of the virus in late February.

I hung up, feeling distressed. Trump never did seem willing to fully mobilize the federal government and continually seemed to push problems off on the states. There was no real management theory of the case or how to organize a massive enterprise to deal with one of the most complex emergencies the United States had ever faced. Beyond being a reporter, I was worried for the country.

“He’s got one foot in and one foot out,” Graham said, describing the call afterward. “He wants to be a wartime president, but he doesn’t want to own any more than he has to own.”

On April 10, Trump predicted the U.S. death count would be lower than the minimum predicted by the task force’s models. “The minimum number was 100,000 lives, and I think we’ll be substantially under that number,” he said.

He alternated between blaming Democratic governors for failures and claiming he had total authority over the national response. “When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total,” Trump said. “And that’s the way it’s got to be. It’s total.”

“Okay,” I said. “So your big decision now is what to do with the virus.” “I’m comfortable,” he said. “I’m comfortable. I’m comfortable. You won’t even know if it’s a good decision probably by the time you come out with the book. Maybe it’ll go away. But it’s possible you won’t even know about it.” “But I want to describe the process,” I said. I asked about Fauci and Birx and how many other experts he’d consulted. “Well you know Fauci got it wrong,” Trump replied. “Fauci said no problem in late February.” Trump was partially correct. Fauci had said on the Today show, “Right now the risk is still low, but this could change.”

“I am not going to sit back and preside over the funeral of the greatest country in the world,” Trump said. “You guys have to realize. You’re my medical experts. But my job is to look at a lot of different factors.”

“I don’t know how you’re going to do it,” Trump said. “You guys can do what you want. You know, figure out a way to do it, but we cannot stay closed. We’ve got to reopen.” The president was emphatic about it, sounding almost as though he were pleading with his public health advisers. “You know, we’ve got to do it,” Trump said. “We’ve really got to do it, Deb. We’ve got to do it, Tony. We just got to do it.”

The virus claimed the lives of more than 50,000 Americans in April alone, bringing deaths to 63,000 total. Still, the president sounded optimistic and upbeat in public. “It’s gonna go,” Trump said at a meeting with industry executives on April 29. “It’s gonna leave. It’s gonna be gone. It’s gonna be eradicated.”

He noted that Katie Miller, press spokesperson for Vice President Pence, had just tested positive “out of the blue. That is why the whole concept of tests aren’t necessarily great.… She was tested very recently and tested negative. And then today, I guess, for some reason, she tested positive.”

Trump went on to disparage vaccines. “Well,” he said, “I feel about vaccines like I feel about tests. This is going to go away without a vaccine.…

But eventually, it’s going to go away. The question is will we need a vaccine? At some point, it will probably go away by itself. If we had a vaccine, that would be very helpful. I’d be very happy to have a vaccine.”

“We’ve exploded the testing ecosystem,” Kushner said.

“If a city or a state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residents,” he said, “then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.”

It appeared the president had walked to the church to give photographers and cameramen an opportunity to take his picture with the burned church and a Bible as props.

So that was an easy speech for me to write. Usually I write them and/or substantially adjust them.” “Did somebody help you?” “Yeah, I get people. They come up with ideas. But the ideas are mine, Bob. The ideas are mine. Want to know something? Everything’s mine. You know, everything is mine.”

“And so the idea of standing there with the Bible, that’s quite a photo,” I said. “It’s my idea. Nobody else. And a lot of people loved it.”

Though they had started out as opponents in 2016 when Graham had run for president, Graham had come to genuinely like Trump. It was not just the political advantage that accrued from a public friendship with a president, or the influence Graham wielded with Trump by staying in his orbit with frequent phone calls and golf outings. Trump could have a consequential presidency despite all the drama, and Graham wanted to remain a Trump ally. If the president considered someone an ally, he would accept their criticism. He would never accept criticism if he came to see them as an enemy.

In Fauci’s view some of Trump’s early decisions had been his finest hours—restricting travel from China (January 31) and Europe (March 11) and asking sick Americans to stay home and all to practice good hygiene with his initial “15 Days to Slow the Spread” (March 16) and then extending it for another 30 days (March 29). The president had stepped up to the task and had listened to Birx, Redfield, himself and others.

On April 17, in the middle of what was supposed to be the 30-day extension of the “15 Days to Slow the Spread,” Trump tweeted “Liberate Minnesota,” “Liberate Michigan,” and “Liberate Virginia,” expressing support for a subversion of his own guidelines. Fauci’s jaw dropped. He asked his colleagues, What was going on?

“The president is on a separate channel,” Fauci later told others. Trump’s leadership was “rudderless.”

Trump seemed interested in one outcome. “His sole purpose is to get reelected,” Fauci told an associate. Fauci was particularly disappointed in Kushner, who talked like a cheerleader as if everything was great.

“I’m somebody that likes to get things done rather than talk.”

The man is full of it.

It’s a new form of slavery that has occurred in this country that you’re president of.

Woodward did drink the Kool-Aid.

“As you know,” I said, “the virus is on fire. Absolutely on fire.” “It’s only on fire because of our testing. Because we’re testing 40 million people,” he said. But the percentage of positive tests was also going up—a key indicator of trouble.

“Have you called Tony Fauci in and sat him down in the Oval Office?” I asked. “He couldn’t win that argument with me,” Trump said. “He cannot win that argument.” If he hadn’t acted, he said, “We would have had three million dead instead of 130,000 as of today.” Trump was correct. The travel restrictions on China and Europe and the initial shutdowns did save lives.

“The goal” with Trump, Kushner said, “is to get his head from governing to campaigning.”

The offense soon appeared. First, the White House released a document listing the number of times Fauci had been wrong in his predictions about Covid-19, a highly unusual and, from a health point of view, irresponsible effort to undermine the chief of infectious diseases. Fauci had privately acknowledged he was not by any means always correct. But polling showed that he was trusted by at least twice as many people as Trump.

“What grade would you give yourself on the handling of the coronavirus?” I asked. “Well, I think I’d give myself a very good grade because what we’ve done—you know, we were totally—when I took over, there was nothing, there were no provisions.” No one was prepared for this.

The media is my opponent, regardless of anything. No matter how well we do, they will say we didn’t do well.”

“I’ve got 106 days,” he said. “That’s a long time. You know, if I put out a plan now, people won’t even remember it in a hundred—I won the last election in the final week.” “No, no,” I said. “But it’s not just put out the plan, it’s execute it, isn’t it?” “No. I am executing. You’ll see it starting. I’ve already started. But you will see things being signed—documents being signed, not just—this isn’t just a plan, this is getting it done. I will have immigration done. I will have health care done. “I think we’re going to have vaccines soon,” he said. “I think we already have them. But they’re in tests. And you’ll see them being announced over the next month. Now would you view that as a game changer?”

He sounds like a kid who makes excuses to his teacher about getting his homework done.

“I give ourselves an A. But the grade is incomplete, and I’ll tell you why. If we come up with the vaccines and therapeutics, then I give myself an A-plus.”

But the interviews show he vacillated, prevaricated and at times dodged his role as leader of the country despite his “I alone can fix it” rhetoric.