South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Failure to take on COVID-19 doomed Trump
WASHINGTON — It was a warm summer Wednesday, Election Day was looming and President Donald Trump was even angrier than usual at the relentless focus on the coronavirus pandemic.
“You’re killing me! This whole thing is! We’ve got all the damn cases,” Trump yelled at Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior adviser, during a gathering of top aides Aug. 19 in the Oval Office. “I want to do what Mexico does. They don’t give you a test till you get to the emergency room and you’re vomiting.”
Mexico’s record in fighting the virus was hardly one for the United States to emulate. But the president had long seen testing not as a vital way to track and contain the pandemic but as a mechanism for making him look bad by driving up the number of known cases.
And on that day he was especially furious after being informed by Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, that it would be days before the government could give emergency approval to the use of convalescent plasma as a treatment, something Trump was eager to promote as a personal victory going into the Republican National Convention the following week.
“They’re Democrats! They’re against me!” he said, convinced that the government’s top doctors and scientists were conspiring to undermine him. “They want to wait!”
Throughout late summer and fall, in the heat of a reelection campaign that he would go on to lose, and in the face of mounting evidence of a surge in infections and deaths far worse than in the spring, Trump’s management of the crisis — unsteady, unscientific and colored by politics all year — was in effect reduced to a single question: What would it mean for him?
The result, according to interviews with more than two dozen current and former administration officials and others in contact with the White House, was a lose-lose situation. Trump not only ended up soundly defeated by Joe Biden, but missed his chance to show that he could rise to the moment in the final chapter of his presidency and meet the defining challenge of his tenure.
Efforts by his aides to persuade him to promote mask wearing, among the simplest and most effective ways to curb the spread of the disease, were derailed by his conviction that his political base would rebel against anything that would smack of limiting their personal freedom. Even his own campaign’s polling data to the contrary could not sway him.
His explicit demand for a vaccine by Election Day became a misguided substitute for warning the nation that failure to adhere to social distancing and other mitigation efforts would contribute to a slow-rolling disaster this winter.
His concern? That the man he called “Sleepy Joe” Biden, who was leading him in the polls, would get credit for a vaccine, not him.
The government’s public health experts were all but silenced by the arrival in August of Dr. Scott Atlas, the Stanford professor of neuroradiology recruited after appearances on Fox News.
With Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House virus task force, losing influence and often on the road, Atlas became the sole doctor Trump listened to. His theories, some of which scientists viewed as bordering on the crackpot, were exactly what the president wanted to hear: The virus is overblown, the number of deaths are exaggerated, testing is overrated, lockdowns do more harm than good.
The administration had some positive stories to tell. Trump’s vaccine development program, Operation Warp Speed, had helped drive the pharmaceutical industry’s remarkably fast progress in developing several promising approaches. By the end of the year, two highly effective vaccines would be approved for emergency use, providing hope for 2021.
But Trump’s unwillingness to put aside his political self-centeredness as Americans died by the thousands each day or to embrace the steps necessary to deal with the crisis remain confounding even to some administration officials. “Making masks a culture war issue was the dumbest thing imaginable,” one former senior adviser said.
His own bout with COVID-19 in early October left him extremely ill and dependent on care and drugs not available to most Americans, including a still-experimental monoclonal antibody treatment, and he saw firsthand how the disease coursed through the White House and some of his close allies.
Yet his instinct was to treat that experience not as a learning moment or an opportunity for empathy, but as a chance to portray himself as a Superman who had vanquished the disease.
Weeks after his own recovery, he would still complain about the nation’s preoccupation with the pandemic.
Trump never came around to the idea that he had a responsibility to be a role model, much less that his leadership role might require him to publicly acknowledge hard truths about the virus — or even to stop insisting that the issue was not a rampaging pandemic but too much testing.
Trump had always tolerated, if not encouraged, clashes among subordinates, a tendency that in this case led only to policy paralysis, confusion about who was in charge and a lack of a clear, consistent message about how to reduce the risks from the pandemic.
Keeping decision-making power close to him was another Trump trait, but in this case it also elevated the myriad choices facing the administration to the presidential level, bogging the process down in infighting, raising the political stakes and encouraging aides to jockey for favor with Trump.
The result at times was a systemwide failure that extended well beyond the president.
The relationship between Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and Dr. Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, grew increasingly tense; by early November, they were communicating only by text and in meetings.
Mark Meadows, White House chief of staff, was at odds with almost everyone as he sought to impose Trump’s will on scientists and public health experts.
Some of the doctors on the task force, including Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Robert Redfield, were reluctant to show up in person at the White House, worried that the disdain there for mask wearing and social distancing would leave them at risk of infection.
Vice President Mike Pence was nominally in charge of the task force but was so cautious about getting crosswise with Trump as they battled for reelection that, in public at least, he became nearly invisible.