Rage

by Bob Woodward

And in an interview with President Trump on March 19, six weeks before I learned of O’Brien’s and Pottinger’s warnings, the president said his statements in the early weeks of the virus had been deliberately designed to not draw attention to it. “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.”

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So what had President Xi said yesterday? “Oh, we were talking mostly about the virus,” Trump said. Why? I wondered. “Mostly?” “And I think he’s going to have it in good shape,” Trump said, “but you know, it’s a very tricky situation.” What made it “tricky”? “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.” “Deadly” was a very strong word. Something was obviously going on here that I was not focused on. Over the next month I would make trips to Florida and the West Coast, oblivious to the mounting pandemic. 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.

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Trump continued, “Pretty amazing. This is more deadly” than the flu, maybe five times more so. “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.”

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On May 11,

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Coats agreed. “To him, a lie is not a lie. It’s just what he thinks. He doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a lie.”

As Coats’s relationship with Mattis grew closer, his friendship with Pence grew more distant. “Once he became vice president,” Coats said, “he built that kind of cocoon around him that basically said, this is the role of the vice president.” In Coats’s eyes, his old friend had become passive, subservient and obedient.

If the North Koreans realized the United States had shot down their missile, or had even tried to, they would likely prepare to fire more missiles. “The potential we’d have to shoot to prevent a second launch was real,” according to Mattis.

God, I’m not ready!”

In late July 2018, just weeks after the Trump-Putin meeting, Coats gathered the intelligence chiefs—FBI director Christopher Wray, NSA director General Paul Nakasone, CIA director Gina Haspel—in the Situation Room for a classified briefing to President Trump on election security and foreign power interference in the upcoming 2018 midterm elections. Haspel had replaced Pompeo at the CIA in May. Though Coats knew Russian interference was a sore subject with the president, he charged ahead with the briefing. We continue to see a pervasive messaging campaign by Russia to try to weaken and divide the United States, he said. Russia is the chief culprit, but other countries are potentially involved—China, Iran. We will assure the American people that their vote will be counted accurately and won’t be manipulated. I like that, Trump said. The NSA and CIA had evidence, highly classified, that the Russians had placed malware in the election registration system in at least two counties in Florida—St. Lucie County and Washington County. There was no evidence yet that the malware had been activated. It was sitting there to be used. The voting system vendor used by Florida was used by state election registration systems all around the country. The Russian malware was sophisticated and could be activated in counties with particular demographics. For instance, in areas with higher percentages of Black residents, the malware could erase every tenth voter, almost certainly reducing the tota...

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meeting with Your Excellency

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the Chinese were increasing information barriers and trying to keep U.S. reporters out of Wuhan. The few who slipped in were put in hotel rooms and told not to leave. Others were later expelled. Pottinger concluded the Chinese were more aggressive with expulsions than the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. All signs were pointing to an effort to hide something. Even before the virus crisis, O’Brien and Pottinger believed China represented the greatest and most fundamental existential national security threat to the United States. “They would love world domination,” O’Brien said during a private, closed-door West Wing briefing December 20, 2019. “Be the premier power in the world. There’s no question about it.” “No doubt about it,” Pottinger said. Under President Xi “the ideology is now front and center again in a way it hasn’t been since Mao.” Earlier O’Brien and Pottinger had aggressively argued against allowing the Chinese firm Huawei, the largest telecommunications

equipment manufacturer in the world, into U.S. markets. O’Brien was convinced that Huawei wanted to use its fifth generation (5G) wireless network eventually to monitor every citizen in the world. It was another major national security threat to the United States. O’Brien said, “Backdoor your medical records, your social media posts, your emails, your financial records. Personal, private data on every American. Micro-target you based on your deepest fears.” “Every member of Congress,” Pottinger said. With the ground reports out of Wuhan showing the new virus spreading quickly, O’Brien knew the Chinese were going to try to get out of Dodge. The mayor of Wuhan had acknowledged as much on January 26, saying five million people had left the city in the week before the Chinese government locked it down. The Chinese were wealthier than they had been 10 or 20 years ago in prior pandemics,

So at Trump’s next PDB, January 28, O’Brien issued his declaration that the virus would be “the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency,” and Pottinger backed him up.I The next day, the White House announced the creation of a Coronavirus Task Force. Press secretary Stephanie Grisham said in a written statement: “The risk of infection for all Americans remains low, and all agencies are working aggressively to monitor this continuously evolving situation and to keep the public informed.” In a Michigan speech January 30 Trump said, “We have very little problem in this country at this moment—five. And those people are all recuperating successfully. But we’re working very closely with China and other countries, and we think it’s going to have a very good ending for it, so that I can assure you.” On Friday, January 31, about 3:00 p.m. Fauci, Azar and Redfield were hovering outside the Oval Office waiting to go in and make a presentation to Trump and Pence. They had been discussing the next steps. “They’re shutting down Wuhan,” Fauci said to the others. We better take them seriously. “We’d better shut them down.” They all knew the first rule of epidemiology: Time would govern how an outbreak could build with exponential growth and surprise and explode. Or be contained. That day three major airlines—American, Delta and United—had announced the suspension of flights between the U.S. and China for the next several months. Eventually they were shown in

In our previous conversation, the president had accused me of drinking the Kool-Aid when I asked him about the idea of white privilege and the anger and pain of Black people. “My question to you,” I said, “and this is the Kool-Aid question, do you understand people who feel passionately—I mean, the Black Lives Matter movement is real. There are a lot of people who are angry and feel pain. You were saying, hey look, I can’t be those people. That’s quite true. But I think it’s really important to step out of your shoes.” “That’s okay,” he said. “I get it. I’m okay with that.” I reminded him I had my tape recorder on. “That’s okay. I don’t mind. You can have it on. I’m a straight shooter.” I said I thought people wanted to hear “the president talking to Black people in this country about what you understand they’ve gone through. And, you know, we can get to what your remedy is and what you’re going to fix. But do you understand you’re a person of white privilege just like I am? And the question is, can somebody like you—because of your position—step out and say, you know, I’ve got some breaks, I’ve had advantages? There are people out there who have not, and I understand their anger and their fierce, fierce resentment of people like you and people like me.” “I feel I do understand it,” Trump said. “But if I didn’t understand it, I would not have done criminal justice reform that nobody was able to do but me. I would not have done opportunity zones which have had a tremendousl...

“The question is,” I asked, “What’s in your heart? I think people want to understand that you understand. What’s the essence of your responsibility as president?” “I think the essence of my responsibility is to do a good job for all communities.” “Suppose I had 10 Black Lives Matter people here as a focus group. And I said, here’s President Trump. And this is what President Trump wants to say to you about how he can step out of his shoes, to understand what life is like in your shoes. And what are you going to say?” “I’m somebody that likes to get things done rather than talk.” “Sometimes when you get in these things,” I said, “You have to lay it on yourself. And there’s no bigger ‘yourself’ in this country than you, as president. And I’m not trying to get you to say something you don’t feel. I’m asking whether you can understand the plight, struggle, pain of people—I mean it’s real. It’s been an awakening for me, if I may say that, at my age. I’m older than you—77. To see that they are saying, it’s been a raw deal, and I’ve not liked it, and it’s a form of oppression. It’s a new form of slavery that has occurred in this country that you’re president of. And I want to make sure I understand what you want to say to them. You understand that?” “Yeah, I do, Bob. I think this. I think that I have some wonderful—what I can do best is get things done. And I have some wonderful things that I’m going to be doing for the Black community in the United States. And I did a lot of it u...