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When the story of how the United States handled the first real pandemic of the global era is written, March 6 will jump off the timeline.
That was the day Donald Trump visited the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. USA In Atlanta. His foray into the world’s best disease research agency was meant to show that the United States had everything under control. He came in half the time when he was still denying that the coronavirus posed a threat and the moment he said he had always known it could devastate America.
Shortly before the CDC visit, Trump said “in a couple of days, [infections are] it’s going to be close to zero. “The United States then had 15 cases.” One day, it’s like a miracle, it will go away. “A few days later, he said,” I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic. “
That afternoon at CDC provides an x-ray in Trump’s mind at the midpoint between denial and acceptance.
We now know that Covid-19 had already passed the breaking point in the United States. The contagion had spread for weeks in New York, Washington state, and other groups. The curve pointed sharply upward. Trump’s goal in Atlanta was to state otherwise.
With his “Keep America Great” baseball cap, the President of the United States was flanked by Robert Redfield, CDC chief, Alex Azar, United States Secretary for Health and Human Services, and Brian Kemp, Governor of Georgia. In his 47-minute interaction with the press, Trump played his greatest hits.
He dismissed CNN as fake news, bragged about his high Fox News audience, cited recent highs in the US stock market, called the Democratic governor of the state of Washington a “snake” and admitted that he did not know that a great number of people could die from the common flu. He also misunderstood a question about whether he should cancel campaign rallies for public health reasons. “I had no trouble filling [the stadiums]Trump said.
What caught the media’s attention were two comments he made about the disease. There would be four million test kits available in one week. “The evidence is beautiful,” he said. “Anyone who needs a test gets tested.”
Ten weeks later, that is still not close to being true. Fewer than 3 percent of Americans had been tested in mid-May. Trump also bragged about his understanding of science. He quoted a “super genius” uncle, John Trump, who taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and hinted that he inherited his intellect. “I really get it,” he said. “Each of these doctors said,” How do you know so much about this? “Maybe I have a natural ability.” Historians can also linger on that observation.
Test numbers
What the headlines missed was a boast that posterity will be taken more seriously than Trump’s self-estimated IQ, or exaggerated test numbers (CDC’s true number of kits in March was 75,000).
Trump proclaimed that the United States led the world. South Korea had its first infection on January 20, the same day as the first case in the United States, and, he said, called the United States for help. “They have many infected people; we do not “.
“All I’m saying is, ‘calm down,'” the president said. “Everyone trusts us. The world depends on us. “
You could also have said that baseball is popular or that foreigners love New York. America’s leadership in any disaster, be it a tsunami or an Ebola outbreak, has been a truism for decades. The United States is known for helping others in an emergency.
In hindsight, Trump’s claim for global leadership is fading. The story will mark Covid-19 as the first time it stopped being true. American air bridges have disappeared in action. The United States cannot even stock up.
South Korea, which has a population density almost 15 times higher and is next to China, has lost a total of 259 lives to the disease. There have been days when the United States has lost that number 10 times. His death toll is now close to 90,000.
What went wrong I interviewed dozens of people, including strangers whom Trump regularly consults, former top advisers, World Health Organization officials, prominent scientists and diplomats, and figures within the White House. Some spoke unofficially.
Over and over again, the story that emerged is that of a president who ignored January’s increasingly urgent intelligence warnings, fires anyone who claims to know more than he does and trusts no one outside a small cabin, led by his daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner. – the real estate developer Trump has empowered to put aside the world’s best-financed disaster response bureaucracy.
Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, whom the President has empowered to set aside the world’s best-financed disaster response bureaucracy. Photograph: Mandel Ngan / AFP via Getty Images
People often observed during Trump’s first three years that he had not yet been tested in a true crisis. Covid-19 is much bigger than that. “Trump’s handling of the pandemic at home and abroad has revealed more painfully than anything since he took office the meaning of America First,” says William Burns, who was the most important US diplomat and is now the head of the Carnegie Foundation.
“The United States is the first in the world in deaths, the first in the world in infections and we stand out as an emblem of global incompetence. Damage to the influence and reputation of the United States will be very difficult to undo. “
Choice
The psychology behind Trump’s inaction at Covid-19 was exhibited that afternoon at the CDC. The unemployment number had come out that morning. The United States had added 273,000 jobs in February, lowering the unemployment rate to a near-record low of 3.5 percent.
Trump’s reelection chances seemed 50-50 or better. The previous Saturday Joe Biden had won the South Carolina primary. But the Democratic competition still seemed to have many miles to go. Nothing could scare the Dow Jones.
Any signs that the United States was preparing for a pandemic were discouraged, including taking real steps to prepare for it.
“Jared [Kushner] had been arguing that testing too many people, or asking for too many fans, would scare the markets and therefore we shouldn’t do it, “says a Trump confidant who speaks to the president frequently.” That advice worked much more powerfully in he than what the scientists said. He thinks they always exaggerate. “
Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, who regularly talks to Trump and is a campaign adviser, says the mood was on the brink of euphoria in early March. “The economy was moving at full speed, the stock market was running at full blast and that job report was fantastic,” says Moore. “It was almost too perfect. No one expected this virus. It hit us like a meteorite or a terrorist attack. “
People in Trump’s orbit like to compare the coronavirus to the September 11 attacks. George W. Bush lost the red flags in preparation for the al-Qaeda Twin Towers attacks. But only once was he explicitly warned of a possible plot a few weeks before it happened. “Okay, you covered your butt,” Bush reportedly told the brief.
At some point, Congress is likely to establish a body like the 9/11 Commission to investigate Trump’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. The investigation would find that Trump was warned countless times of the threat of an epidemic in his daily presidential reports, by federal scientists, health secretary Alex Azar, Peter Navarro, his business adviser, Matt Pottinger, his Asian adviser, by business friends. and the world. usually.
Any report would likely conclude that tens of thousands of deaths could have been prevented, even now that Trump is pushing to “free” states from the blockade.
“It is as if we knew for sure that September 11 was going to happen for months, we did nothing to prepare and then he shrugged a few days later and said, ‘Well, there is not much we can do about it,'” he says. Gregg Gonsalves, a Yale University public health scholar, “Trump could have prevented the mass deaths and he did not.”
To be fair, other democracies, especially the UK, Italy and Spain also wasted their time failing to prepare for the oncoming attack. Whoever was the President of the United States could have been equally hurt by Washington’s internal struggles.
The CDC has been plagued with setbacks and mistakes during the crisis. The agency spent weeks trying to develop a jinxed test when it could have simply imported WHO-approved kits from Germany, which has been making them since late January. “The CDC has disappeared in action,” says a former senior aide at the Trump White House. “Due to the CDC’s mistakes, we did not have a true picture of the spread of the disease.”
“The worst person”
Yet here again, Trump’s hallmark is clear. It was Trump who chose Robert Redfield to head the CDC despite widespread warnings about the former military officer’s controversial record. Redfield led the Pentagon’s response to HIV aid in the 1980s. It involved isolating suspected soldiers at so-called HIV Hotels. Many of those who tested positive were dishonorably discharged. Some took their lives.
Robert Redfield, who was appointed by Donald Trump to head the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. USA Despite widespread warnings about his controversial record. Photograph: Mandel Ngan / AFP via Getty Images
A devout Catholic, Redfield saw AIDS as the product of an immoral society. For many years, he championed a highly publicized remedy that was discredited in evidence. That debacle led to his dismissal from work in 1994.
“Redfield is the worst person you could think of heading the CDC right now,” says Laurie Garrett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist who has reported on epidemics. “Let your biases interfere with science, which you cannot afford during a pandemic.”
One of the limitations of the CDC was to insist on developing its own test instead of importing a foreign one. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the now renowned infectious disease expert, is widely known for loathing Redfield and vice versa. That meant that the CDC and the Fauci National Institutes of Health were not on the same page.
Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. USA Photograph: Mandel Ngan / AFP via Getty Images
“The last thing you need is for scientists to fight each other in the midst of an epidemic,” says Dr. Kenneth Bernard, who established an anti-pandemic unit at the White House in 2004, which was scrapped under Barack Obama.
The shortage of kits meant that scientists lacked a picture of rapidly spreading infections in the United States. The CDC was forced to conduct rationing tests on “people under investigation,” people who had reached within 6 feet of someone who had visited China or had been infected with Covid-19 in the previous 14 days.
Most were denied. Few could prove that they met any of the criteria. This was at a time when several countries, especially Germany, Taiwan, and South Korea, gave access to on-site testing, including in transit centers, an option that most Americans still lack.
“You’ve been commuting to New York by train or subway every day, you appear ill at the clinic and they refuse to give you a test because you cannot prove that you have been within 6 feet of someone with Covid-19.” says the former adviser. “You’ve probably been close to half a million people in the past two weeks.”
Test restrictions narrow down options. “Once a 1 percent prevalence is reached in any community, it is too late for non-pharmaceutical interventions to work,” says Tom Bossert, who created the White House pandemic office since it was dissolved before John Bolton kicked him out in 2018, Trump’s then-national security adviser.
‘Great job’
By March 11, just five days after Trump’s CDC visit, reality was beginning to seep in. In a transmission from the Oval Office, Trump banned travel from most of Europe, expanding the partial ban he had imposed on China in February. Two days later, he declared a national emergency. Even then, however, he insisted that the United States led the world. “We have done a great job because we act quickly,” he said. “We act early.
However, over the next 48 hours, something popped into Trump’s mind. Quoting a call with one of his children, Trump said March 16: “It’s bad. It’s bad … They think August [before the disease peaks]. It could be July. It could be longer than that.
Eleven days later, Boris Johnson, Prime Minister of Great Britain, hired Covid-19. The disease almost killed him. That was Johnson’s way to Damascus. Many hoped that Trump would have had a similar conversion. If so, it didn’t last long. The following week, he said the United States should reopen before Easter on April 12.
“I was one of those who advised him to be” Easter Sunday, “says Moore.” So I told him what I think now, that this blockade is causing more deaths and misery than the disease itself. “
Trump’s mindset became increasingly surreal. He started promoting hydroxychloroquine as a cure for Covid-19. On March 19, in a regular televised briefing, which he conducted daily for five weeks, often rambling for more than two hours, he described the antimalarial drug as a potential magic bullet. It could be “one of the greatest game changers in the history of medicine,” he later tweeted.
The president’s leap of faith, inspired by Fox News presenters, especially Laura Ingraham, and his attorney Rudy Giuliani, none of whom have a medical history, reversed the Washington bureaucracy. The scientists who objected were punished.
In April, Rick Bright, the federal scientist in charge of developing a vaccine, arguably the most pressing role in government, was eliminated after blocking efforts to promote hydroxychloroquine.
Most clinical trials have shown that the drug does not have a positive impact on patients with Covid-19 and can harm people with heart problems. “They lobbied me for politics and buddy to drive decisions about the opinions of the best scientists we have in government,” Bright said in a statement.
In a whistleblower complaint, he said he was pressured to send millions of dollars in contracts to a company controlled by a friend of Jared Kushner. When he refused, he was fired. The US Department of Health and Human Services. USA He denied Bright’s allegations.
Terrified
Other scientists have noted Bright’s fate. During the Ebola outbreak in 2014, when the Obama administration sent 3,000 US military personnel to Africa to combat the epidemic, the CDC held a daily briefing on the state of progress. He has not had one since early March. Scientists across Washington are terrified of saying something that contradicts Trump.
“The way to keep your job is to be loyal to everyone else, which means you have to put up with the quackery,” says Anthony Scaramucci, a former Trump aide, who was briefly his chief of communications at the White House. “You have to flatter him in public and flatter him in private. Above all, you should never make him feel ignorant.
An administration official says advising Trump is like “bringing fruit to the volcano”: Trump is the source of lava. “You are trying to appease a great force that is impervious to reason,” says the official.
When Trump suggested in late April that people could stop Covid-19, or even heal, by injecting disinfectant, such as Lysol or Dettol, his chief scientist, Deborah Birx, did not dare to contradict him. The major bleach companies issued statements urging clients not to inject or ingest disinfectants because they could be fatal. The CDC only issued a cryptic tweet advising Americans to “follow the instructions on the product label.”
“I can’t even return my calls,” says Garrett. “The CDC has led the response to all diseases for decades. It is now out of sight. “
A former high-ranking Trump official says: “People become cowards around Trump. If you confront him, you will never enter again. What you see in public is what you get in private. He is exactly the same. “
Revival disunity
America’s foreign partners have had an equally clear reminder of Trump’s way of doing business. Few Western leaders are as ideologically aligned with Trump as Scott Morrison, Australia’s prime minister.
Early in the epidemic, Morrison created a national cabinet that meets at least once a week. It includes all the first states of the two main parties. Morrison’s unit cabinet projects an air of bipartisan resolve in a country that has lost just under 100 people to coronavirus in three months. Some days, the United States has lost more people every hour.
Trump, by contrast, pits the governors of the United States against each other, just as he does with his staff. Republican states have received considerably more ventilators and personal protective equipment per capita than Democratic states, despite having much lower hospitalization rates.
Trump says the United States is waging a war against Covid-19. In practice, it is fueling national disunity. “It is like telling governors that each state has to produce its own tanks and bullets,” says Bernard. “You are only in this. It is not my responsibility.”
Trump’s instinct to eat dog has been as strong abroad as at home. A meeting of G7 foreign ministers in March failed to agree on a statement after Mike Pompeo, the US secretary of state, insisted that they label it the “Wuhan virus.” The United States refused to participate in a recent summit organized by Emmanuel Macron, President of France, to collaborate on a vaccine.
More dramatically, Trump has suspended U.S. funding for the WHO, which he says covered up China’s lies. Previously, the WHO confirms that Trump had now met with Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in the oval office in June 2017, shortly before taking office and supporting his candidacy.
Other critics say the Geneva-based body was too ready to take Beijing’s word for it. There is some truth in that statement. “They were too afraid to offend China,” says Bernard, who was WHO director in the United States for two years. But their bureaucratic shyness did not prevent other countries from taking advance precautions.
Trump alleged that WHO negligence had increased the world’s death rate “20-fold.” In practice, the agency must always comply with the limits of the member states, especially the big ones, especially the United States and China. That is the reality for all multilateral organizations. However, the WHO declared an international emergency six weeks before Trump’s announcement in the United States. WHO officials say Trump’s move has seriously hampered his operations.
“You don’t shut off the hose in the middle of the fire, even if you don’t like the firefighter,” says Bernhard Schwartländer, WHO chief of staff. “This virus threatens every country in the world and will exploit any crack in our resolution.” The body, in other words, has been the victim of hostility between the United States and China.
Global forces
Blaming China for the US and WHO death rate could help Trump’s re-election campaign. Many voters are too ready to believe that the United States is a victim of dire world forces. Garrett, who was a senior member of global health on the Council on Foreign Relations, quotes Inferno, a lesser-known novel by Dan Brown, author of the best-selling Da Vinci Code, in which WHO plays a cowardly role.
One of its main characters is a biologist at CFR. During a pandemic, she kidnaps the WHO chief and places him in the basement of the expert group. He is rescued by a WHO military team that launches onto the body’s C-130 plane. In reality, the agency has no police powers at all.
“We are not like Interpol,” says Schwartländer. The WHO cannot insist more on going to Wuhan to investigate the origins of Covid-19 than on breaking into Atlanta to investigate the CDC’s delay in producing a test.
Both the United States and China have spread outlandish rumors about each other. Some Chinese officials have spread the unfounded conspiracy theory that the US military planted the virus in Wuhan at a sporting event last year. Trump administration officials, including Pompeo, have repeatedly suggested that Covid-19 originated from a bat-to-human transmission in the Wuhan virology laboratory.
Last month, Australia called for an international investigation into the origins of the disease. “Australia’s goal was to disable conspiracy theories in both China and the United States,” says Michael Fullilove, director of the Lowy Institute, Australia’s largest expert group.
Days later, the Australian Daily Telegraph, a tabloid newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch, discovered that the “five eyes,” the intelligence agencies of the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, had concluded that the disease it came from Wuhan. laboratory, either by accident or by design. It seems that the story had no substance. Fauci and other scientists say the pathogen almost certainly comes from a wet market in Wuhan. There was no “five eyes” file.
According to a top five-eyed intelligence official and a figure close to the Australian government, the Daily Telegraph story probably came from the United States embassy in Canberra. After its publication, there was no chance that Beijing would accept an international investigation.
The report damaged Australia’s hopes of calming tensions between the United States and China. “We used to think of the United States as the world’s leading power, not as the epicenter of the disease,” says Fullilove, a fervent pro-American. “We feel increasingly caught between a reckless China and a reckless America that no longer seems to care about its allies.”
Primary objective
So where does the American plague chapter go from here? At the beginning of his partial turnaround, Trump said scientists told him that up to 2.5 million Americans could die from the disease. The latest estimates suggest that 135,000 Americans will die in late July. That means two things.
First, Trump will tell voters that he has saved millions of lives. Second, it will continue to push aggressively for US states. USA Lift your locks. Its primary objective is to revive the economy before the general elections. Both Trump and Kushner have declared completing the mission in the pandemic.
“This is a great success story,” said Kushner in late April. “We have prevailed,” Trump said Monday.
Economists say a V-shaped recovery is unlikely. Even then it could be two glued Vs, one W, in other words. The social mix resulting from any short-term economic reopening would likely come at the price of a second contagious outbreak. While the second V started only after November, Trump could be re-elected.
“From Trump’s point of view, there is no other choice,” says Charlie Black, a senior Republican consultant and lobbyist. “It is the economy or nothing. You can’t exactly run with your personality. “
Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, had a slightly different emphasis: “The Trump campaign will be on China, China, China,” he says. “And hopefully the fact that the economy restarted.”
In the meantime, Trump will likely continue to hang onto the possibility of miracle cures. Every week since the outbreak began, she has said a vaccine is just around the corner. His latest estimate is that it will be ready by July. Scientists say it will take a year at most to produce an inoculation. Most say 18 months would be lucky. Even that would break all records. The previous fastest development was four years for mumps in the 1960s.
For now, Trump has been persuaded to cease his daily briefings. White House internal polls show that his once-double-digit lead over Biden among Americans over 65 has been removed. It turns out that retirees are not fanatics of collective immunity.
The President’s friends are trying to figure out how to bring life back to normal without causing a new death toll. After an initial concentration in March, Trump’s poll numbers have been steadily declining for the past month. For the next six months, the microbial fate of the United States will be in the hands of its president’s erratic re-election strategy. There is more than a breath of growing despair.
“Trump is trapped in a box that is getting smaller and smaller,” says George Conway, a Republican lawyer who is married to Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s chief adviser. “In my opinion, he is a sociopath and an evil narcissist. When a person suffering from these disorders feels that the world is drawing near to them, their tendencies worsen. They attack and fantasize and lose any ability to think rationally. “Conway is known for making fun of Trump on Twitter (to a large extent, it should be added: Trump often retaliates).
However, without exception, everyone I interviewed, including the most fervent Trump loyalists, made a similar point to Conway. Trump is deaf to advice, one said. He is her worst enemy, said another. He only listens to the family, said a third. He is mentally unbalanced, said a fourth. In other words, the United States should prepare for a turbulent six months ahead, with no guarantee of a safe landing. Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2020
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