At a briefing on April 10, Mr. Trump predicted that the number of deaths in the United States from the pandemic would be “substantially” fewer than 100,000. As of Saturday, the death toll stood at 139,186, the pace of new deaths was rising again and the country, logging a seven-day average of 65,790 new cases a day, had more confirmed cases per capita than any other major industrial nation.
The president had a decision to make.
It was the end of March and his initial, 15-day effort to slow the spread of the virus by essentially shutting down the country was expiring in days. Sitting in front of the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office were Drs. Fauci and Birx, along with other top officials. Days earlier, Mr. Trump had said he envisioned the country being “opened up and raring to go” by Easter, but now he was on the verge of announcing that he would keep the country shut down for another 30 days.
“Do you really think we need to do this?” the president asked Dr. Fauci. “Yeah, we really do need to do it,” Dr. Fauci replied, explaining again the federal government’s role in making sure the virus did not explode across the country.
Mr. Trump’s willingness to go along — driven in part by grim television images of bodies piling up at Elmhurst Hospital Center in New York City — was a concession that federal responsibility was key to defeating a virus that did not respect state boundaries. In a later Rose Garden appearance, he appeared resigned to continuing the battle.
“Nothing would be worse than declaring victory before the victory is won,” Mr. Trump said.
But even as the president was acknowledging the need for tough decisions, he and his aides would soon be looking to do the opposite — build a public case that the federal government had completed its job and unshackle the president from ownership of the response.
The hub of the activity was the working group assembled by Mr. Meadows, who had just taken over as chief of staff.
Joe Grogan, the domestic policy adviser, had come around to Mr. Trump’s view that the reaction to the virus was overblown, a position shared at that point by Marc Short, Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff and a frequent participant in the meetings. Russell T. Vought, the president’s acting budget director, was there to address the pandemic’s mounting costs.
Chris Liddell, a deputy chief of staff, and Jared Kushner, the president’s senior adviser and son-in-law, acted as the group’s procurement and supply-chain experts.
Hope Hicks, the protector of Mr. Trump’s brand, was a regular participant. Kevin A. Hassett, a top economic adviser, came at times to help assess the numbers and also participated in a 9 a.m. meeting three times a week with Mr. Meadows and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on the economic aspects of the pandemic.
Then there was Dr. Birx, the response coordinator of the coronavirus task force. Unlike Dr. Fauci, who only stopped by the White House to attend meetings, she was given an office near the Situation Room and freely roamed the West Wing, fully embracing her role as a member of the president’s team.
By mid-April, Mr. Trump had grown publicly impatient with the stay-at-home recommendations he had reluctantly endorsed. Weekly unemployment claims made clear the economy was cratering and polling was showing his campaign bleeding support. Republican governors were agitating to lift the lockdown and the conservative political machinery was mobilizing to oppose what it saw as constraints on individual freedom.
At the meetings in Mr. Meadows’s office, the issue was clear: How much longer do we keep this up?
To answer that, they focused on two more questions: Had the virus peaked? And had the government given the states the tools they needed to manage the remaining problems?
On the first question, Dr. Birx and Mr. Hassett were optimistic: Mitigation was working, they insisted, even as many outside experts were warning that the nation would remain at great risk if it let up on social distancing and moved prematurely to reopen.
Mr. Meadows thought of himself as a data-driven decision maker, and in addition to models and infection numbers from the states and the C.D.C., they looked at traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike (the volume of cars coming in and out of New York City was down by 95.2 percent); payroll and credit card data, and the number of people who were reporting to have self-quarantined.
If the point was to sustain a monthlong lockdown, the numbers told them, the administration succeeded. If it was to squelch the virus to containable levels, later events would show the officials were oblivious to how widely it was already spreading.
The members of his group believed they had succeeded on the second question, too, although shortages of protective gear continued in some places (and would flare again months later).
A one-time anticipated shortage of more than 100,000 ventilators had been overcome; now there was enough of a surplus that the United States could lend them to other countries. A ban on elective surgeries meant there was plenty of bed space — and no more need for the Navy’s hospital ships.
The group thought governors should no longer have trouble getting what they needed for hospitals, doctors and first responders. And they grew increasingly frustrated by what they saw as politically motivated complaining about a lack of federal help and the inability of some states to make effective use of the supplies they were receiving.
Enraged by criticism from New York’s Democratic politicians about not being able to find a shipment of ventilators from the federal government, Mr. Grogan, the domestic policy chief, angrily told Mr. Kushner that they should put more ventilators on eighteen-wheelers, drive them into New York City and invite news helicopters to record it all — just to embarrass Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio.
On April 14, the country passed what the group saw as a milestone, administering its three millionth test. Inside the West Wing, Mr. Kushner was insistent on that point: Given their assumption that infections would not surge again until the fall, there was enough testing ability out there.
Those outside experts who disagreed were largely brushed off. In mid-April, Dr. Ashish K. Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, urged a top administration official to embrace his call for conducting 500,000 coronavirus tests a day — far more than was happening at the time.
The official, Adm. Brett P. Giroir, the administration’s testing czar, who had been delivering upbeat descriptions of the nation’s growing testing capacity, eventually conceded to Dr. Jha that his plan seemed to be needed. But he made clear the federal government was not prepared to get there quickly.
“At some point down the road,” is what Dr. Jha said Admiral Giroir told him.
“My take is that Jared Kushner believes that this is not something that the White House should get too involved in,” Dr. Jha recalled. “And then the president believes that it is better left up to the states.”
Their critics notwithstanding, White House officials came to feel that they had in fact accomplished their job: giving governors the tools they needed to deal with remaining outbreaks as infections ebbed.
The wind down of the federal government’s response would play out over the next several weeks. The daily briefings with Mr. Trump ended on April 24. The Meadows team started barring Dr. Fauci from making most television appearances, lest he go off message and suggest continued high risk from the virus.
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