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to produce needed material in a national emergency, Kushner refused. “The federal government is not going to lead this response,” Kushner told them. “It’s up to the states to figure out what they want to do.”[13] The next week, he and Trump repeated this in a public briefing. “We’re not a shipping clerk,” the president said.[14] Days into the crisis, the Trump administration had seemingly abandoned a federal leadership role.
To Trump, public displays of grief were a sign of weakness, and he was all about strength. He was “powerful,” the government was hitting the virus “strongly.” Dying was weak.
“The only thing we haven’t done well,” he boasted the day after announcing the shutdown, “is get good press.”[16]
The Covid briefings were the twenty-first-century equivalent of the Five O’Clock Follies during the Vietnam War when generals misled reporters each evening about the victory that was perennially just around the corner.
The daily follies not only showcased Trump at his Trumpiest but modeled the exact behavior the federal government was discouraging among other Americans. In announcing the shutdown, Trump had in theory endorsed social distancing guidelines urging Americans to stay at home, avoid gatherings of more than ten people, refrain from unnecessary travel, and stop going out to restaurants and bars. When out in public, they were to remain at least six feet apart from anyone outside their families. But there was Trump standing at the podium flanked by a half dozen or more advisers standing inches apart.
Only a handful of reporters were physically in the briefing room every day for Trump’s performances, not because the White House, which still resisted precautions, had imposed social distancing rules but because the correspondents themselves insisted upon it. Trump relished combat with the ones who were there, finding it easier to do battle with them than with the elusive virus.
The briefings also introduced the country to an unlikely new star, the diminutive, grandfatherly Anthony Fauci, an elfin-faced foil to the president. At seventy-nine, Fauci had the reassuring bedside manner and scientific credibility that Trump did not. He was a legend in medical circles, having served as the federal government’s top infectious disease specialist under seven presidents going back to Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, when he was at the forefront of the fight against AIDS. Back then, Fauci was initially the subject of enormous anger by the gay community that felt he was not doing
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He leaned heavily on that advice now with Trump, an outlook that made him almost unique for being willing to stand next to the president and correct him in real time. Whenever Trump minimized the seriousness of the disease, Fauci would politely, but unmistakably, make clear that was not so.
Trump, of course, noticed. He always noticed when someone else was standing in his spotlight.
Of all the absurd ideas that Trump would entertain about the coronavirus, perhaps the most nonsensical was that the pandemic would not be so bad if the government simply stopped testing so much—as if the testing was causing the virus to spread. It was like a teenager hoping that as long as she did not take a pregnancy test, she would not actually be pregnant.
Neither had been rigorously tested yet to determine effectiveness against Covid but Trump invariably trusted what he was hearing from his rich peers and conservative media, even if they contradicted the experts.
Laura Ingraham had been pushing hydroxychloroquine on her Fox News show for a couple days, hosting a Long Island lawyer, Gregory Rigano, who falsely passed himself off as an adviser to Stanford Medical School.
Asked by a reporter the next day if there was evidence that the drug would be effective against Covid, Tony Fauci, with Trump standing right next to him, said flatly, “The answer is no.”[26]
Whatever mix of vanity or political concern played into Trump’s decision to reject masks, it would have a profound effect. Rather than bring the country together behind a simple, modest preventive measure, he helped make mask wearing a political statement and one more battleground in the country’s perpetual culture war.
Meadows was not a supporter of Donald Trump—until he was.
As for the pandemic, Meadows considered it overblown from the start. He believed that those over sixty with certain preexisting health conditions such as obesity, diabetes, or cancer were vulnerable, but that most everyone else faced little real danger, and it was ridiculous to close down the country. He had no hesitation about confronting Deborah Birx and Tony Fauci, indifferent to their collective decades of experience with infectious disease. A skeptic of the science behind climate change who had even dabbled in the field of “creationist paleontology,” Meadows thought the doctors were
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Yet by giving up on trying to stop the virus, Meadows was making it a self-fulfilling prophecy—and reinforcing Trump’s own instincts.
If the choice was listening to the smug guys in the white lab coats who rolled their eyes about him or siding with the bearded men in camouflage vests and red MAGA baseball caps waving assault rifles outside the state capitol in Lansing, he would pick the gun toters.
From the day of the LIBERATE tweets, Trump resisted not only masks and lockdowns but even the idea that doctors should be heeded. Less than a week later, on April 23, he made what would come to be one of the most mocked comments of his presidency after scientists at the daily briefing reported that the virus was vulnerable to bleach, alcohol, and ultraviolet light. Trump began musing out loud on camera. “Supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way, and I think you said you’re going to test that too,” Trump told the scientists.
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The president had increasingly taken to calling Covid “the Chinese virus” or “China virus” or even more overtly racist variations like “kung flu.”
We will not turn our back on the American people.
It doesn’t matter what country you came from, what your last name is—what matters is we’re Americans. We’re all Americans. That under these colors of red, white, and blue—the colors that my parents fought for in World War II—means something around the world. It’s obvious to me that you don’t think of those colors the same way I do. It’s obvious to me that you don’t hold those values dear and the cause that I serve.
Yet the Constitution offered no practical guide for a general faced with a rogue president.
At the church, Ivanka Trump, in heels and a sparkly face mask, extracted a Bible from her oversize white purse, a $1,500 number from Max Mara, and handed it to her father. Trump then brandished it for the cameras. Was it his family Bible? a reporter shouted at him. It was “a Bible,” he replied.[3]
“Mr. President,” Miller said, “they are burning America down. Antifa, Black Lives Matter, they’re burning it down. You have an insurrection on your hands. Barbarians are at the gate.” “Shut the fuck up, Stephen,” Milley told others he had replied. “Shut the fuck up.” In another clash with Miller in the Oval Office, Milley had resorted to pointing at a painting of Abraham Lincoln on the wall. “That guy up there, Lincoln had an insurrection,” Milley said. This was not the same thing.
“Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?”[5]
debunked
A few days later, Kayleigh McEnany, the latest White House press secretary, announced to reporters with a straight face that Trump’s walk to St. John’s was just like Winston Churchill touring London during the Blitz.
Esper offered perhaps the lamest initial spin to justify his participation in the walk, telling NBC News the day after the photo op that he thought he was there to accompany the president as he met with troops and “inspected” a looted toilet in the park.
“We have rules in Germany, we have rules in Europe. I’m not going to be a leader who’s going to ignore rules.”
“I don’t expect you to understand that, Mr. President,” he said. “It’s an ethic for us, a duty.”
“These animals,” he screamed, “these thugs looted Hermès!” For several minutes, Carlson railed at her about the riots and what he saw as the president’s failure to respond more vigorously. It seemed abusive, even unhinged.
Nothing bothered Trump more than a suggestion that he might be weak.
For Trump, the only Americans who really counted were the ones who supported him. His entire approach as a politician was about feeding them the red meat that would keep them energized and angry at whoever was the enemy of the day.
He acted as though he was the president of Trump’s America, not the president of all Americans.
But his recommendation that the president run a positive, forward-looking, optimistic campaign under the rubric of leading a “Great American Comeback” belied Trump’s essential nature.
But the notion that Democrats would overturn the will of their own primary voters was ludicrous, suggesting how out of touch the president had become.
The reckless event led to multiple Secret Service agents and advance staff members coming down with Covid. So did Herman Cain, the former pizza mogul and onetime Republican presidential candidate who was among Trump’s highest-profile Black supporters. Cain, who like others in the crowd went without a mask, tested positive nine days after the rally, and died a month later.
Jack O’Donnell, former president of the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, said Trump would be upset if he noticed too many Black Americans on the gambling floor. “It’s a little dark tonight,” he would tell O’Donnell, who also claimed that Trump asserted that “laziness is a trait in Blacks” and complained about an African American accountant. “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” Once on a construction site, Trump noticed a Black worker. “What is that Black guy doing over there?” he demanded,
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“Tell me one country run by a Black person that isn’t a shithole. They are complete fucking toilets.”[20]
Trump ritually denied being a bigot. “I am the least racist person you have ever met,” he said over and over.[23] But he did not seem to mind that he left the opposite impression. Once he became president, his “very fine people” remarks in the aftermath of the white supremacist march in Charlottesville were followed by plenty of others—the Haitian immigrants who “all have AIDS,” the African visitors who would never “go back to their huts,” the “shithole” countries sending too many people to the United States.[24] He declared that four liberal Democratic congresswomen of color who called
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Trump regularly claimed that he had done more for Black Americans than any president with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln.
The trip boosted his spirits and his ego as he told other Republicans that he thought he should be added to Mount Rushmore alongside Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt.
By summer, the president had all but stopped speaking with Fauci, or “Dr. Doom” as the Trump team called him, and was looking for someone to reinforce his own preconceptions. At one point, Trump promoted on Twitter a “very impressive” doctor who shared his faith in hydroxychloroquine and skepticism about masks—without realizing that she also blamed various ailments on demon sperm, believed medical treatments were being developed from alien DNA, and preached about the dangers of having sex with witches in your dreams.[45]
The Trumpification of the party was so complete that the convention produced no platform, the document traditionally adopted by a party every four years to outline its agenda and positions on major issues of the day, an abdication unheard of in modern times. Instead, the Republican National Committee simply released a resolution declaring that it “enthusiastically supports President Trump,” rendering it a party that stood for nothing other than its leader.[53]
“But so, I think, I think it would be, I think it would be very, very, I think we’d have a very, very solid, we would continue what we’re doing, we’d solidify what we’ve done and we have other things on our plate that we want to get done.”[54]
maybe even revive his quixotic quest for a Nobel Peace Prize.
After all, it was basically a real estate disagreement, right? Who knew real estate better?
At Kushner’s urging, Trump was approaching the Palestinians the same way he had handled New York condominium owners he wanted to force out so he could redevelop their property—turning off the heat, refusing to make repairs, ordering the doorman not to accept packages. If he made their life miserable, they would be ready to take any lowball deal that Trump offered, or so the theory went. Same with the Palestinians. “I’m going to drive their price down as much as possible,” Kushner confided to one Middle East expert. But the Palestinians were not recalcitrant tenants who would simply move
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Although Netanyahu lavished all the usual praise on Trump (“the greatest friend that Israel has ever had in the White House”), the president grew more impatient the longer the speech went on.[17] Trump did not like anyone stealing his thunder, especially in his own house.
