Reliving a year of death, as havoc reigned in White House
One of the most striking things about “Nightmare Scenario,” a new book about the Trump administration’s shambolic response to COVID-19, is how the narrative seems to run on two tracks.
One follows the chaotic story of the White House and the government agencies, with staffers running around, ostensibly trying to address a deadly pandemic while also trying to please President Donald Trump; the other follows the inexorable advance of the novel coronavirus itself, as it made its way through the American population.
The authors, Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta, work for The Washington Post — Abutaleb is a reporter who covers health policy and Paletta is the paper’s economics editor. “‘Nightmare Scenario’ aims to provide the first, complete narrative of what really happened inside the Trump administration between January 2020 and January 2021,” they state in a prefatory note, offering a guide to their intentions while also managing expectations. This is a book that was written with speed and diligence. Whether it will appeal to you depends on how enticed you feel by the authors’ promise to delve into “the decisions, meetings and moments that shaped one of the worst years in U.S. history” and “to document it all.”
They generally make good on that promise, thoroughly chronicling a year so full of upheaval that revisiting it now can feel like entering a fever dream. I had somehow forgotten that Trump visited
India toward the end of February 2020, fumbling with a spinning wheel in the home of Mahatma Gandhi; or that he garbled a prepared speech from the Oval Office two weeks later, saying the exact opposite of what he was supposed to say and sending markets tanking.
But most of that is beside the point — or should be, though incidents such as those amounted to so much of the “news” generated by a president who supplied a steady stream of unpresidential behavior.
In February, when Trump heard that a number of Americans were trapped on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, he floated the idea of quarantining infected passengers at Guantanamo Bay, where terrorist suspects were being indefinitely detained. Abutaleb and Paletta say that Trump wasn’t so much concerned with protecting Americans as he was with keeping the official infection numbers down: “If they were in Gitmo, the reasoning went, they wouldn’t count.”
There are scoops in this book, but for the most part they’re more like teaspoons of weak tea than substantive revelations. Anthony Fauci was so beloved by the public that some of his fellow doctors started to resent him. A plan to send a free mask to every American household was scuttled after some senior officials compared the mask to a jockstrap or a training bra, saying it looked “like you have a pair of underwear on your face.” Trump was apparently so enraged at former national security adviser John Bolton for writing a tell-all book that at one point he said: “Hopefully COVID takes out John.”
It’s a line that sounds like a (bad) joke, but Abutaleb and Paletta depict it as an instance of Trump turning “darkly serious.” That characterization feels like an awkward stretch, and this book as a whole lacks the narrative verve of recent books by Michael Lewis or Lawrence Wright about the pandemic. Some of the scenes in “Nightmare Scenario” are drawn out to the point of dramatic exhaustion.
Recounting how Trump walked slowly toward the helicopter that would fly him to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center after he himself was sickened by the virus in October, the authors minutely detail his lumbering path, asking, “Could the whole year have flashed before his mind’s eyes during those 51 steps?”
“Nightmare Scenario” may be explicitly about COVID-19, but the authors also document another sickness, one that is endemic to the country. A crisis that might have unified a fractious nation was instead weaponized in ways that exacerbated existing divisions.