“I told Jared that if Trump won a second term, he wouldn’t have to worry about running again and you can really help people,” recalls one New York business executive. “Jared just looked at me and said, ‘I don’t care about any of that’”
On the afternoon of Thursday, March 19, Donald Trump sat in the Oval Office obsessing over the beaches in Florida. CNN footage of shirtless spring breakers packed onto the sand while the coronavirus pandemic raged sparked national outrage—and pressure on Trump to act.
DeSantis’s intransigence backed Trump into a corner. The 41-year-old governor was a Trump protégé and a crucial ally in a must-win state. “Trump is worried about Florida, electorally,” said a Republican who spoke with Trump around this time. Trump did something he rarely does: He caved. He told DeSantis the beaches could stay open.It was inevitable that Health and Human Services secretary Alex Azar would become the West Wing COVID-19 scapegoat.
When the coronavirus exploded out of China, Kushner was the second most powerful person in the West Wing, exerting influence over virtually every significant decision, from negotiating trade deals to 2020 campaign strategy to overseeing Trump’s impeachment defense. “Jared is running everything. He’s the de facto president of the United States,” a former White House official told me.
Navarro and Pottinger finally convinced Trump to stop the flights when they showed him that more than 400,000 people had entered the U.S. from China since early January. “Trump was stunned by the sheer scale,” a Republican briefed on the meeting told me. “Navarro banged on the table enough to get the flights stopped.” On January 31, Trump barred travel from China. Even then, it was a half measure: the ban only applied to non-Americans who had traveled to China in the previous 14 days.
They weren’t. On February 23, the CDC documented the first case of person-to-person transmission in California. “Once you had community spread, we realized all bets are off,” Fauci later told me. Trump tweeted on February 24: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA….Stock Market starting to look very good to me!” The market plunged nearly 900 points the next day. Trump called Azar and screamed that the CDC was alarming people.
His press conference at the CDC on March 6 was his first full-scale attempt at media ownership of the crisis, and it will be remembered as a Trumpian classic, heavy on braggadocio, an infomercial with himself as the product. “I like this stuff. I really get it,” Trump told reporters, his face partly hidden under a red “Keep America Great” hat. “People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors say, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability.
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