What really happened in.., p.11
What Really Happened In Wuhan, page 11
But there was one thing Trump was even more concerned about than the spread of the virus through the United States – and that was creating panic in the population, sparking an economic collapse. “We worried about a panic, no question, 100 per cent. We were absolutely worried about a panic,” Mulvaney says. “It never bothered me that the President tried not to create a panic. The President was very concerned about creating a panic, and the President believes in the power of positive thinking. He would much rather focus on the positive than the negative. And I think that came across in how he handled the Covid crisis. It was very difficult for him to go out there and give a worst-case scenario.
“When he goes out and says the disease will be gone by springtime, that was not entirely baseless. But it was certainly against the overwhelming evidence that was presented to him. Was there a chance that the disease would have gone away as the temperatures went up? And the days got longer? Yes. He would take little kernels, and then magnify them in order to put the best face forward. In hindsight, obviously, it turns out to be something that hamstrung the administration’s response to the crisis.”
Azar asked Mulvaney to pull together a working group with regular meetings on the coronavirus, formalising a group Pottinger had first created two weeks earlier. Mulvaney ran it but it was considered Azar’s group. It kicked off on January 29 and became the “Coronavirus Task Force”. Its first mission was to evacuate American diplomats and their families from Wuhan and shut down international travel from China to the US. Azar, Mulvaney, Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun, Redfield, Kadlec, Fauci and others were gathered in the Situation Room, with Mulvaney at the head of the table. One agency head updated the room that the hundreds of Americans from Wuhan had been evacuated and the two 747s were on their way back to the States. “Great news, the planes are in the air.”
There was backslapping around the room before someone asked a prescient question, “Where are they going?” Each agency head, the most senior leaders in the Trump administration, looked around the room, waiting for another to speak. There was silence as the realisation dawned that there was no intended location yet. The planes, carrying hundreds of passengers from China, all potentially infected with coronavirus, had no place to go, no health procedures to follow. Considerable planning had gone into the refueling stop in Alaska, but the final destination was less settled. The working plan was the planes were going to land at a commercial airport, probably LAX, then the passengers would be put on buses and taken to a nearby hotel for two weeks. “Can you imagine what kind of outcry that will create?” one official said. “Everybody sort of looked around the table and said, ‘How did that happen?’”
After this initial panic, the Department of Defence official left and went out in the hallway, tapping at his mobile phone. About 15 minutes later he walked back in with the solution to take the hundreds of potentially infected Americans to an air force base in southern California. It was remote and had housing for hundreds of people.
The chaotic situation shocked many members of that group. “It was classic bureaucracy,” one participant tells me. “Too many agencies involved. Nobody in charge. Those planes took off without us knowing exactly where they were going to land. Unbelievable.”
Trump was, by the start of February, getting almost daily briefings on the virus. Staff from 10 different agencies would meet at 10am; the working group, co-chaired by Azar and Mulvaney, would meet at 3pm; and Trump would be briefed at 6pm by the Coronavirus Task Force.
Those nightly briefing sessions with the Coronavirus Task Force would grow tense and argumentative. The President was surrounded by big personalities who had major differences of opinion on how to respond to the virus. The meetings were large, with 15 to 20 people crammed into the Oval Office at 6pm daily; there was standing room only. With Trump permanently ensconced behind the presidential desk, the back-and-forth arguments erupted around him.
“This is how the President functioned. He liked big meetings,” says one attendee.
The way the President preferred to consume his information was to listen to a verbal briefing. There were no data or policy recommendations or briefing notes or analysis for him to consume and think about overnight. If there was a document of sorts – perhaps a graphic representation showing a spike in Italy’s cases or some raw data – it was at most one page, never even three pages. It was all verbal, a fresh flow of information. That’s how Trump worked. The nightly press conferences arose from this, following his 6pm briefing.
Partly because of the decision to pull US diplomats out of Wuhan, there were few Americans on the ground in the city. Information was limited and the Trump administration was overly reliant on Chinese authorities for intel about the severity of the virus and its properties. “We knew it was a coronavirus and we knew it was centred in Wuhan, that’s about all that we knew, keeping in mind the Chinese had restricted the World Health Organization access,” Mulvaney says.
Navarro was furious that the administration still was not taking the virus seriously enough. His point of view was dismissed so regularly that he continued writing memos in the paperless White House, to ensure his advice would be recorded. The White House was paperless because senior members of Trump’s senior team were not allowed to communicate via text or WhatsApp under the Presidential Records Act. Not allowing paper also suited Trump’s paranoia about people leaking information about him. The official mobile phones belonging to some senior figures even had text messaging and cameras blocked.
“My government-issued phone was not capable of taking pictures and not capable of texting,” one source says. “We were not allowed to communicate like that. We were heavily restricted in what we could text in the White House. There was no way, at least early in the administration, to guarantee that text messages could be preserved by law.” Meeting arrangements and administrative matters could be communicated via email.
But Navarro ignored the directive. “I papered the shit out of them,” he tells me. “I think in February there was a dozen memos. They knew their arse was on the line. That was the power I had.”
Navarro sent a memo, on February 23, to the President, copying in the National Security Advisor, the Chief of Staff and the Covid-19 Task Force, warning of mass deaths and insisting that resources needed to be thrown toward vaccine development. “There is an increasing probability of a full-blown Covid-19 pandemic that could infect as many as 100 million Americans, with a loss of life as many as 1–2 million souls,” Navarro wrote in the memo that was later leaked to news website Axios. “We CAN develop a vaccine and treatment therapeutics in half the usual time. We must get appropriate protective gear and point of care diagnostics.” He hit back at “any member of the Task Force who wants to be cautious about appropriating funds for a crisis that could inflict trillions of dollars in economic damage”. This was a not-so-subtle dig at Mulvaney and his Deputy Chief of Staff, Chris Liddell.
Senior figures in the CDC, however, were starting to come to terms with just how severe the virus could be. “I got my first projection of the impact of the pandemic in late February and it was a difficult evening that evening because it projected up to 2.2 million people would be dead by September. This pathogen was going to be a big problem,” Robert Redfield said in a conversation with the Council on Foreign Relations after he left the role. Two days later, senior CDC official Nancy Messonnier warned Americans that Covid-19 was likely to spread throughout the United States and the disruption to daily life would be “severe”. She warned about the possibility of a pandemic. Her press briefing had followed a decision by the Coronavirus Task Force to escalate the pandemic threat plan. But Messonnier, under the instruction of Redfield, jumped the gun and announced it before the President had been informed.
Trump, on his way back from India following a 36-hour trip with his family, rang Health Secretary Alex Azar from Air Force One to praise him for his performance at a hearing that day answering coronavirus questions. Trump hadn’t caught up with the comments made by Messonnier but had been informed by Louisiana Senator John Kennedy that Azar had done a stellar job while then Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf had been “terrible”. Trump asked Azar to start a daily Covid-19 press conference. It was a surprisingly positive call, seeing as just the month earlier Trump had called Azar “panicky” in front of witnesses, with the conversation leaking to the media.
In the morning, Azar took an early call from the President, who had just landed and was back at the White House. Trump was fuming about Messonnier’s comments, which he was now across. “What the hell is she doing out there scaring the markets?” he wanted to know.
The Dow Jones had fallen nearly 900 points in the worst week since the Global Financial Crisis in 2008. “Mr President, what she said is factually correct, in fact, we are coming to brief you this afternoon on precisely this. She just got ahead of her skis. But it’s completely correct and it’s what we need to be saying,” Azar replied.
Trump said, “I want to have a press conference this afternoon to settle things down, we need to explain all of this to the public because it’s out of control. The market is overreacting.”
Azar deliberately chose to defend Messonnier, who he had worked alongside in the Bush administration. But it would cost him.
By 8.45am, a story had popped on Politico that said Trump was considering appointing as coronavirus czar Scott Gottlieb – a doctor and the former Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), who had been informally advising the White House. The FDA was part of HHS, which was run by Azar.
Though it was Mulvaney who had been running the Coronavirus Task Force, this appointment was seen as a move that would replace Azar.
Azar was giving evidence at a House Appropriations Committee hearing when the story broke, and the chairwoman Rosa DeLauro quizzed him on it. He hadn’t read it.
Trump phoned Azar during a break, “Hey, should I appoint Scott Gottlieb as coronavirus czar?”
“Scott is great. I love Scott but he’s not going to do it,” Azar replied, explaining Gottlieb had deliberately left the White House to move to Connecticut with his family and was also unlikely to leave his board position at Pfizer. Trump then also raised Deborah Birx as a possibility. Azar told Trump he would see him for their pre-planned meeting at 5pm.
Mulvaney, unaware that this conversation had taken place, caught up with Trump in the Oval Office. “We need to make a change,” Trump told him. “We need to put somebody big at the head of this thing.” It wasn’t only because of Messonnier’s comments. In late February, as the situation grew grave in Italy and alarm and anxiety began to consume the American public, Trump wanted someone serious at the head of the Task Force. It would be good for optics and to indicate the “seriousness of the group” by putting someone big in at the helm of the multi-agency initiative.
“Mr President, no problem with that, that makes perfect sense. Who do you want?” Mulvaney replied. Trump wanted Gottlieb. “We can’t have Scott Gottlieb,” Mulvaney reasoned. “He used to work for Azar, and if you put him in charge of the Task Force, Azar will quit, because he will deem it to be a personal affront. And he’d be right to do so, because this would be putting his subordinate above him. He would almost be forced to quit.”
The President considered this and Mulvaney pressed on, imploring the President not to make a decision that could erupt in yet another scandal. “Mr President, we cannot afford to have the [Health Secretary] quitting in the midst of what could be an international worldwide pandemic,” Mulvaney pleaded.
By 5pm, Trump had come up with the idea of putting Mike Pence in charge, who was automatically senior to the cabinet secretaries. Pence would end up running the entire coronavirus strategy, but he kept a relatively low profile and managed to escape scrutiny and blame, which fell on the President’s shoulders.
That evening of Wednesday, February 26, Trump addressed the nation for the first time on the coronavirus. Flanked by Pence, his newly-announced coronavirus czar, and half a dozen senior officials, Trump, in a bright pink tie, reassured Americans only 15 people in the US had coronavirus and were “getting better”. “The risk to the American people remains very low and we have the greatest experts in the world right here,” he said. The naive, relaxed attitude to a deadly virus that was quickly spreading around the globe worried Azar, Navarro and Pottinger, among others.
While the CDC was highly concerned about the virus, Trump’s senior officials continued with their strategy of downplaying the virus in order to save the markets. Mulvaney went on television and urged Americans not to wear a mask. The interview was at the direction of Fauci. Fauci later defended his position on masks by saying there was a shortage of them in the United States at the time, and he wanted to preserve the limited supply for medical professionals, but Mulvaney denies this was the explanation given to him by America’s top doctor at the time.
“That’s not what he told me or the team. He said, ‘Tell people not to wear masks, because wearing masks can actually make things worse. If you’re not trained on how to properly use a surgical mask, it can actually create a circumstance where you’re touching your face more often, and could increase transmission of the virus. Please, please, please tell people not to wear masks.’ And I went on national television and said exactly that in February,” Mulvaney recalls.
Another senior health official confirmed to me this was, in fact, Fauci’s advice. “His view was that wearing a mask could be counterproductive because you fiddle with it and your unclean hands could actually introduce disease into your respiratory channel.” The health official says there was also a shortage of masks at the time and they needed to be kept for hospital frontline workers, rather than a rush on them by the American people.
Fauci’s contradictory advice on masks was later laid bare for all to see in an email he sent on February 5, 2020 that was released under the Freedom of Information Act to Buzzfeed in June 2021. “Masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection,” he wrote. “The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out [the] virus, which is small enough to pass through the material. I do not recommend that you wear a mask, particularly since you are going to a very low risk location.”
The tensions between the two camps advising Trump came to the fore when Mulvaney gave an interview to Stephen Moore at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland, where he appeared to call the virus the “hoax of the day”. In the February 28 interview he certainly downplayed the virus, saying “this is not Ebola . . . it’s not SARS, it’s not MERS”. “We sit there and watch the markets and there’s this huge panic and it’s like, why isn’t there this huge panic every single year over flu?” Mulvaney said the media was focusing on the virus because “they think this is going to be what brings down the President”. “Why didn’t you hear about it? What was still going on four or five weeks ago? Impeachment, and that’s all the press wanted to talk about . . . That’s what this is all about.”
On message, Trump repeated the claim the virus was a hoax at a campaign rally 700 kilometres (400 miles) away in South Carolina. “The Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus,” he declared. “One of my people came up to me and said ‘Mr. President they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia. That didn’t work out too well.’ They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. This is their new hoax.”
At that time, the virus had killed 2800 people globally and infected about 80,000. It didn’t seem to some in the Trump administration that it was a real and major threat. Between the hoax line and Navarro telling Fox News host Maria Bartiromo in an interview that the virus may have come from a biowarfare laboratory, the messages emanating from the Trump administration couldn’t have been more inconsistent.
CHAPTER TEN
Pompeo
It might have seemed like President Xi Jinping was pulling the wool over Trump’s eyes, but this certainly wasn’t the case with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. He came to the State Department in April 2018 from the CIA. He already intimately understood the serious strategic threat China posed from his time as CIA director. “Nobody had to tell him that, that wasn’t a revelation to the secretary,” an insider says.
Much of Pompeo’s first six months was focused on the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Iran deal, Obama’s signature foreign policy agreement, in the month after he started. Pompeo had a particular interest in Iran. Alongside US Senator Tom Cotton, he unearthed the secret nuclear side deals between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency when he was a congressman in 2015.
In late 2018, Pompeo turned his attention to China. Under his stewardship, there would be a monumental reset in the relationship and foreign policies between the United States and China. The long-held position on China from both Republican and Democrat administrations in the United States was to view China as a partner, an equal collaborator and an opportunity to get rich. Under Pompeo in particular, this changed dramatically and irrevocably. This China pivot cannot be overstated.
Trump had already opened Americans’ eyes to the unequal trade terms with China, but Pompeo sought to expand it beyond the economic remit to human rights, the exposure of influence operations, intellectual property theft and China’s other malign actions that sought to disadvantage America. “The question was how was Pompeo going to handle it because the President had taken the lead on it,” an insider said. But Trump had not shown an appetite for tackling China beyond the “unfair trade deal”, a hallmark of his election campaign in 2016.
