As White House officials discussed whether to bring afflicted Americans home for care in the early days of the coronavirus epidemic, President Donald Trump proposed his own proposal for where they should be sent, keen to keep the number of affected Americans off American soil.
“Don’t we have an island that we own?” the president reportedly asked all that assembled in the Situation Room in February 2020, before the U.S. outbreak would explode. “What about Guantánamo?”
“We import goods,” Trump specified, addressing his staff. “We are not going to import a virus.”
Aides were taken aback, and when Trump brought it up again, they immediately quashed the plan, fearful of a backlash over quarantining American visitors on the same Caribbean facility where the US keeps terrorism suspects.
“Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History,” is a new book by Washington Post authors Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta that depicts the dysfunctional response to the developing pandemic, including such insider discussions.
The book, which is based on interviews with more than 180 people, including numerous White House senior staff members and public sector health officials, sheds new light on last year’s turbulent and frequently mishandled response, depicting internal conflicts over the leadership of the White House coronavirus task force, unrelenting squabbles that hampered cooperation, and the tremendous endeavors made to prevent the virus from spreading.
The book sheds fresh light on Trump as he vacillated between believing in miraculous coronavirus treatments in his search for good news, dealing with his own condition, which was far more critical than authorities admitted, and worrying about the outbreak’s consequences for his reelection campaign.
“Testing is killing me!” Trump reportedly screamed into a phone call to then Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar on March 18, yelling so loudly that Azar’s aides overheard every word. “I’m going to lose the election because of testing! What idiot had the federal government do testing?”
“Uh, do you mean Jared?” Azar said. Jared Kushner, the president’s top advisor and son-in-law, had promised just five days before to lead a nationwide testing plan with the support of the private sector, according to Abutaleb and Paletta.
Trump replied that the US government should not have been involved in testing in the first place, disputing with his health secretary over why the CDC wanted to monitor illnesses at all. “This was gross incompetence to let CDC develop a test,” Trump allegedly bellowed at Azar.
During the early days of the Trump administration, Kushner and other Trump officials frequently vented their frustrations on Robert Kadlec, the HHS emergency preparation head who approved the evacuation of American COVID patients from the Diamond Princess cruise in February 2020.
The decision “doubles my numbers overnight,” the president complained to Azar, as the official number of U.S. coronavirus cases rose to 28. Trump wanted Kadlec fired, but senior officials stopped him.
According to Abutaleb and Paletta, Kadlec approached Kushner in late March with the news that he had secured the purchase of 600 million face masks.
However, there was a snag: the masks wouldn’t be available until late June, causing Kushner to “explode in anger.”
“”You f*cking moron,” Kushner screamed at Kadlec. “We’ll all be dead by June!”
Trump also wanted Kadlec fired for saving Americans on the Diamond Princess, and then-Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows threatened to remove him for COVID treatment remdesivir distribution issues.
“I’m going to fire your ass if you can’t fix this!” Meadows reportedly screamed at him.
Trump’s rages regularly distracted top officials and hindered the national response, with the president promoting his speculations, finally turning to chosen advisers like radiologist Scott Atlas, who had no experience with infectious diseases or public health.
The book portrays the president as ineffective and out of touch as his health and national security staff struggled to manage the spreading epidemic.
During the epidemic, Trump struggled with political optics as he wanted to fire staff but couldn’t. He was held back by aides concerned about political ramifications and the consequences of compromising public health.
Trump wanted to fire Anthony S. Fauci, but instead White House officials increasingly tuned out his advice and other top health officials, with Trump instead leaning on Kushner, an array of economic advisers and other trusted allies who lacked infectious-disease expertise.
Trump’s senior aides followed suit, making threats and isolating their foes, undermining efforts to contain the epidemic.
The White House response had evolved into a poisonous climate in which Trump insiders were in a constant state of angst, threatening to fire everyone in their path.
When then-Vice President Mike Pence took over as the new chairman of the coronavirus task group at the end of February 2020, replacing Azar, there were high tensions.
Marc Short, Pence’s chief of staff, said Trump was overreacting by listening to public health experts and extending an economic halt until Easter 2020, describing the decision as a gift to Democratic governors.
Short reportedly fought an early HHS initiative to deliver free masks to every American family, a move that many public health experts believe would have depoliticized mask wearing but that Short felt would frighten people needlessly.
There was also a story that the senior aides were joking that the masks “looks like a training bra.”
There were also smaller events that revealed the personalities at the heart of the Trump administration’s response, such as Trump’s senior staff unable to stop his frequent misleading statements, such as his bungle about injecting bleach to fight the virus — a remark that was linked to a subsequent reported spike in calls to emergency poison lines.
The authors collective conclusion was that the biggest flaw of Trump’s Covid response was that absolutely no one was in charge and there was zero accountability at the end of the day.
The amount of deaths that occurred because of the bungling is immeasurable.
