So help me god, p.42
So Help Me God, page 42
On January 8, having returned to Washington, I was in my West Wing office when Robert O’Brien, the president’s national security advisor, burst in. “Mr. Vice President, we need you in the Situation Room now!” I rushed down the narrow stairs that led to the room where the national security team waited. On the giant screens I saw missiles tracking out of Iran heading toward Ayn al Asad, the joint American-Iraqi air base in western Iraq. Karen and I had just been there, making a surprise stop to spend Thanksgiving with our troops. It’s a huge facility; thousands of US soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines are stationed there.
The president joined us shortly after I arrived. I prayed silently as we watched the missiles fly. We were informed by the Pentagon that the attacks were coming.
Most of the personnel stationed on the base were evacuated into the desert; the planes were ordered into the air. After the missiles hit, we waited in the Situation Room for a bomb damage assessment. Thankfully, there were no deaths. We would learn in time, though, that there had been more than a hundred injuries; many of the people who remained sheltered on base suffered concussions from the explosions and had to be treated. Various press outlets reported that the Iranian missile attack on Ayn al Asad had been an intentional miss. That was absurd. The Iranians had intended to kill Americans. But for the swift professionalism of our service members on the ground, they would have.
A short time later, we received indications from Tehran that the Iranians were done, not interested in escalation to a full-scale war with the United States. The president had acted decisively. Our troops had done their job courageously. Soleimani was gone. It was over.
* * *
In late December, the president and I lunched in the dining room in the back of the Oval Office, where we met so often, discussing our prospects for reelection. The economy was roaring, and unemployment was low. Impeachment was a distraction but not a great worry. We were genuinely proud of what we had accomplished in three years, from tax cuts to military spending to two new justices on the Supreme Court. The passage of the USMCA was nearing. ISIS was devastated; Baghdadi was dead. We were rebuilding the US military and had created a new branch of it to compete with China and Russia in space. And as we looked at the numbers, the maps, and the Democratic competition, we had reason to feel confident about the coming campaign. We both thought things looked good, but I offered a cautionary thought: “Sometimes history shows up.” Those were usually energetic conversations, with very few pauses or silent moments. But this time, the president grew quiet. “What do you mean?” he asked. I told him that unforeseen circumstances can change the world, scramble the most carefully laid plans, level the ambitions of leaders: Fort Sumter, Pearl Harbor, 9/11. These had all been moments when history showed up. He took it in and shot me back a look of knowing recognition.
As 2019 was winding down, Congress fought over what the impeachment trial would look like, when it would begin, who would testify. It was, I knew, a futile act of political theater. Democrats might impeach the president in the House, but the Republican-controlled Senate would acquit him. Whatever Republicans thought about the appropriateness of the Zelensky call, the overwhelming majority of them believed that it was not an impeachable offense. Congress was wasting the country’s time. Meanwhile, a mysterious virus was spreading in Wuhan, China.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE History Shows Up
You will not fear the terror of the night… nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness.
—Psalm 91:5–6
In the first weeks of 2020, my daily briefings contained more and more reports about a new coronavirus that was spreading in the city of Wuhan, China.
Government to government, the United States was told by China that the virus was contained. Doctors in China who attempted to speak out about how contagious the new coronavirus was were silenced. The Chinese government was denying to global health officials that there was evidence of human-to-human transmission. The World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland, took the Chinese Communist Party at its word and repeated the claim—all while the disease was spreading across and beyond China, unbeknown to much of the world. The Chinese, incredibly, shut down travel within their country but not abroad. On January 3, Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), reached out to his Chinese counterpart, offering to send over US experts to help investigate the virus. He was rebuffed. The Chinese government shut down investigations and publications that would have helped the rest of the world develop a better understanding of the virus before it crashed on its shores. The information the Chinese did share was little more than lies. And after the WHO said that there had been “limited” human-to-human transmission of the new coronavirus, it quickly reversed course, presumably under pressure from China, tweeting that there was “no clear evidence” that covid-19 could spread between people.
On January 15, for the third time in US history, a president was impeached when the House of Representatives voted along party lines to impeach Donald Trump. Nancy Pelosi held a signing ceremony after the vote, investing great pomp in sending the articles of impeachment to the Senate, where the president would be tried. She needn’t have bothered. The outcome was never in doubt. The Senate was going to acquit the president, and it did so three weeks later in two votes on the articles of impeachment of 52–48 and 53–47.
But as the impeachment trial got under way, the first documented case of covid-19 reached the United States in Washington State on January 17. The CDC started airport screening of passengers on flights arriving in California and New York from Wuhan. Knowledge of the virus was limited, though, because of the Chinese government’s secrecy. The CDC was scanning arriving passengers for the symptoms commonly associated with the virus—shortness of breath, coughing—when, as the world would soon learn, many cases of the virus were asymptomatic.
On January 22, in an about-face, the WHO declared that coronavirus can be spread by humans. Now reports were arriving that in Wuhan a number of people had died because of it and hundreds more were sick. Its population, more than 11 million, was under quarantine. A week later, the WHO declared a global health emergency. In the days that followed, the numbers of both cases and deaths grew as the virus reached additional countries.
On January 29, President Trump created the White House Coronavirus Task Force. Prior to its creation, the federal government’s response to the new virus had been led by the CDC, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The president named Alex Azar, the secretary of HHS, chairman. Azar had replaced Tom Price in 2018 after the failed effort to replace Obamacare and a controversy over the secretary’s travels. The task force unified the government’s covid response and advised the president on covid policy. Two days later, the task force presented Trump with one of the most difficult decisions of his presidency.
On January 31, Azar brought the task force into the Oval Office to brief the president. By that point there were 10,000 confirmed cases of the virus in China and 200 deaths. There were 114 other cases in other nations. It was clear that the virus was transmissible from human to human. The virus was highly contagious, spreading rapidly around the globe from China, a country from which nearly 3 million people travel to the United States every year. There was no way to monitor every single one of them entering the country. There was a very real concern about the virus spreading through the United States and overwhelming the nation’s health care system.
Surrounded by the nascent task force, Secretary Azar recommended that the president ban travel from China to the United States. That was a momentous decision to make and not one without major complications. Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin reminded Trump of the economic cost of cutting off travel from China, the second largest nation in the world: possibly more than $10 billion in 2020 due to ending the flow of people and commerce. At the time, there were still very few cases identified in the United States. There was a spirited discussion about the benefits of and possible damage by a travel ban, with the public health officials in the room pushing for it and the economic advisors resisting it.
I sat in a chair next to the Resolute Desk in my usual spot and listened. I understood the seriousness of the moment and what the nation was facing. When the Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome, or MERS, had reached Indiana in 2014, it had been of a completely different magnitude, and though the virus had a mortality rate of 30 percent, the first thing the state focused on, working with federal health experts, was stopping its spread. If this virus, covid-19, was pouring out of China, we had to try to cut off its ability to reach us. I sensed, though, how unprecedented and likely subject to wide-ranging criticism doing that would be. As the conversation in the Oval Office reached its conclusion, for the president’s benefit, I asked members of the task force, “Has any president in American history ever suspended all travel from another country?” The answer was no.
Trump sat back in his chair, pondered all that he had heard, and made a decision: the United States would temporarily suspend all travel from China. The following day, Joe Biden, still in pursuit of the Democratic presidential nomination, tweeted his disapproval: “We are in the midst of a crisis with the coronavirus. We need to lead the way with science—not Donald Trump’s record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering.”
President Trump’s decision to suspend travel from China saved countless American lives. It didn’t stop the virus from arriving in the United States, but it likely delayed its arrival. Instead of spreading in mid-March, it would have been in the country a month earlier at least. The decision bought the government time to organize the greatest national mobilization since World War II.
On January 31, the Trump administration also declared covid a public health emergency. The CDC was at work quickly developing tests to send to labs across the country. Life still went on. With his impeachment trial under way, the president delivered his State of the Union address and made mention of the covid outbreak, saying that we were coordinating with the Chinese government and that the administration would “take all necessary steps to safeguard our citizens from the virus.”
The evening was particularly meaningful to me because the president also presented Rush Limbaugh with the Presidential Medal of Freedom and invited him to sit in the House gallery. Rush was fighting cancer at the time and had only another year to live. He had helped shape the conservative movement, and, going back to my days as a broadcaster, I owed a great deal of my inspiration to him. It was heartening to see him with the medal around his neck and hear him receive a standing ovation in the Congress of the nation he loved.
When the address ended, to thunderous applause, I stood up and shook the president’s hand. But I didn’t look to my left to see the speaker of the House ripping up a copy of the State of the Union address on national television. It was, of course, a premeditated gesture. During the address, she had been slowly tearing into the printed document so that she could rip the entire thing in one flourish before the cameras. It was childish, the type of action Pelosi and other Democrats constantly accused Trump of while feigning outrage. It was beneath the dignity of the speaker of the House. And she knew better.
The following day, February 5, to no surprise, the Senate acquitted the president in his impeachment trial. There was not much time for celebrating in the White House, though. The covid-19 death toll in China was rising. Clusters of infection had formed in northern Italy. By early March the Italian government would lock the country down. Testing in the United States, as elsewhere, was scarce. The tests created by the CDC were flawed and in short supply. As the virus spread and our understanding of it grew, the federal response was still coming together across offices within the Department of Health and Human Services. By February 26, fourteen cases of the virus had been confirmed in eight states.
History had shown up.
Near the end of February, President Trump traveled to India, his first visit to the country. Before the trip, Mick Mulvaney, who was still acting White House chief of staff, told my chief of staff that we were facing a pandemic and that federal response needed to be housed in the White House. While the president was in India, my staff learned through back channels that the president planned to ask me to lead the nation’s response to covid-19. It was likely a lose-lose assignment: if the task force was successful, I wouldn’t get any credit; if it failed, I would get the blame. I understood that. But at a moment of incredible uncertainty and peril, credit or blame was irrelevant. I spoke at great length with Karen about it. We both agreed: there was only one answer.
After the president returned from India, we met in the Oval Office. He made clear that he wanted to elevate the importance of the task force by putting in charge someone inside the White House and with a higher profile than a cabinet secretary. “Is that something you could do?” he asked. And as I had done so many times over the last three years, I looked the president in the eye, nodded, and said, “I’m here to serve.”
What gave me confidence was that I had been a governor and had gone through two different health crises, one including the first MERS case in the United States and the other an HIV/AIDS epidemic in a small Indiana town. I had seen firsthand how the state and federal governments could work together during a health crisis. I understood and readily accepted the challenge.
I stood up, walked out of the Oval Office, headed down the hallway, and pulled the team together in my West Wing office for my first meeting as head of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. Not knowing what lay ahead, we bowed our heads and opened that first meeting in prayer. From that moment a seriousness settled on me that was nothing short of God’s grace. I didn’t know what was ahead, but I knew America would rise to the occasion.
On February 26, 2020, the day President Trump appointed me to lead the White House Coronavirus Task Force, the first case of community spread of the virus was identified in California. An American who had not traveled abroad or knowingly come in contact with covid was discovered to be infected. The virus was moving across the land quickly. The United States was facing its greatest public health crisis in a century, and the truth was that we didn’t have what we needed in terms of testing, medical supplies, or medicines to confront the rapidly expanding pandemic.
President Trump gave the White House Coronavirus Task Force one mission: to save lives. To do that, we needed every level of government—federal, state, and local—to rise to the task.
From the outset, I knew that the federal government alone could not meet the challenges ahead. That was not a criticism of its limitation but a realistic assessment that the sheer size of the nation and the scope of what we had to produce—from tests and needles to gowns, gloves, and masks—would require enlisting the full strength of the American economy. And of course the main challenge, which would have to be driven by the private sector, would be inventing and mass-producing a safe vaccine. The federal government could not go it alone; we had to work with industry but also partner with US governors. We didn’t just need a whole-of-government approach, we needed a whole-of-America strategy for fighting covid.
As of late February, the federal government had fewer than three thousand tests that could correctly diagnose covid-19. Across the country there was a shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) for health care workers treating patients and for the patients themselves. The national stockpile of ventilators, which could help patients with severe cases of this respiratory disease breathe, was also low. There was no vaccine for covid, no treatment, nothing in our medical professionals’ arsenal to stop it. The government’s few tools to respond to the pandemic were spread out across agencies and departments, and their deployment was slowed by red tape and regulations. Even with the fog of disinformation coming out of the Chinese government about the nature of the virus, its lethality, its contagiousness, even its origins just beginning to lift, health officials still knew very little about the virus.
The work was ten hours a day, seven days a week. We began the assignment with prayer and focused on the work. I often thought of what Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger had said when he had been asked if he had prayed when he was landing US Airways flight 1549 in the Hudson River: “There were a lot of people in the cabin doing that for me. I had to fly the airplane.” Every day I prayed to put aside any anxious thoughts and work on the problem.
As other nations shut down travel in February, almost ninety-five thousand Americans were left stranded abroad. The task force launched a rescue mission to bring them home safely. A number of Americans who were unable to get back home were on cruise ships. The Diamond Princess, for example, was a British luxury liner stuck in quarantine off the coast of Japan after seven hundred of the four thousand passengers tested positive for the virus. The task force launched a complicated mission to evacuate the passengers, many of them elderly and vulnerable. We coordinated with air force bases in California, Texas, and Nebraska to receive the passengers, who had to be safely transported off the ship and into quarantine on the bases. Another cruise ship, the Grand Princess, was sailing from Hawaii to San Francisco when a number of passengers tested positive for the virus. While the ship sat in the waters off California, we worked with that state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, and the federal Department of Health and Human Services to arrange for the ship to dock at the Port of Oakland and to safely bring testing and medical equipment on board. Under the capable leadership of Secretary of State Pompeo, the State Department, in a little over a month, repatriated sixty-two thousand Americans from a hundred counties on six hundred flights. By the end of 2020, more than ninety-five thousand were back home.
