This piece by Gabe Sherman documents Trump’s odyssey over the past couple of weeks leading to his reluctant acceptance that he’s dealing with an emergency. As recently as last week he was calling sports teams to beg them not to cancel their seasons thinking he could finesse this problem by pretending it doesn’t exist:
“Trump thinks this is a media problem,” a Republican close to the White House told me. Treating COVID-19 as a public-relations crisis put Trump at odds with the medical community, including the White House’s chief coronavirus adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci. During an interview on Meet the Press this weekend, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases urged the United States to move toward a national lockdown similar to the actions taken by Italy and Spain. “I think we should really be overly aggressive and get criticized for overreacting,” Fauci said.
With the markets in free fall despite emergency action by the Fed over the weekend, Trump is waking up to the reality that’s been clear to everyone: Coronavirus poses a once-in-a-hundred-years threat to the country. “In the last 48 hours he has understood the magnitude of what’s going on,” a former West Wing official told me. As Trump processes the stakes facing the country—and his presidency—he’s also lashing out at advisers, whom he blames for the White House’s inept and flat-footed response.
He has to blame someone and this time it’s Jared’s turn in the barrel:
Sources told me Trump is regretting that Kushner swooped into the coronavirus response last week. Kushner, according to sources, encouraged Trump to treat the emergency as a P.R. problem when Fauci and others were calling for aggressive action. “This was Jared saying the world needs me to solve another problem,” a former White House official said. One source briefed on the internal conversations told me that Kushner advised Trump not to call a national emergency during his Oval Office address on March 11 because “it would tank the markets.”
The markets cratered anyway, and Trump announced the national emergency on Friday. “They had to clean that up on Friday,” another former West Wing official said. Trump was also said to be angry that Kushner oversold Google’s coronavirus testing website when in fact the tech giant had a fledgling effort. Trump got slammed in the press for promoting the phantom Google product. “Jared told Trump that Google was doing an entire website that would be up in 72 hours and had 1,100 people working on it 24/7. That’s just a lie,” the source briefed on the internal conversations told me.
He probably would have tried to ride it out but it arrived on his doorstep:
One reason the president’s attitude may be changing is that coronavirus showed up at his doorstep, literally: Mar-a-Lago is now a hot spot. Last weekend, Trump interacted with a Brazilian government official who tested positive for COVID-19. The appearance of coronavirus inside the president’s bubble jolted the president’s inner circle that up until that point treated the virus more like a Democratic plot.
With coronavirus lurking on the property, about a hundred guests sipped cocktails by the pool at a 50th birthday party for Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend, former Fox News personality Kimberly Guilfoyle. RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel announced after attending the party that she was self-quarantining after experiencing flu-like symptoms. Another turning point was an intervention by Guilfoyle’s former colleague Tucker Carlson. A source who attended the party told me Carlson went to Mar-a-Lago to confront Trump directly about his failure to take the virus seriously.
But so what? What do we expect this incompetent to do about it? Well, not much apparently:
Now that Trump is engaged and the crisis is accelerating—the Dow dropped nearly 3,000 points on Monday—Republicans fear he is operating without a playbook at a time when one is desperately needed. On Sunday night, with no unified message coming from the government, rumors swirled online that Trump would imminently announce a national lockdown (the White House tweeted that the rumor was false). But several former White House officials told me they believed the rumor to be true. “This is not what he likes to do,” a former West Wing official said. “There’s no boogeyman he can attack.” On Monday, Trump reportedly told governors they’re on their own. “Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment—try getting it yourselves,” Trump said on a conference call, according to the New York Times.
… Republicans fear a lockdown could compound the crisis if Trump is cooped up in the White House with nothing to watch but the news. “What’s he going to do, watch reruns of the Masters from 2017? He’s just going to watch TV and tweet and it’s going to get worse,” the former official said.
He has no playbook but taking credit for things he did not do and blaming others for the things he did. He is completely out of his depth and it couldn’t be more obvious.
Nonetheless, the press was very impressed today when he came before the cameras and admitted that up is up and down is down for a change. But it’s too late for that. He is who he is and he thought that he could replicate his magical stock rebound of Friday by showing up at 3:30 and … saying something. But as he stood there, trying unsuccessfully to sound like a normal person, the stock market ticker just kept going down and down and down until it closed 3,000 points down — the largest point drop and the second-largest one-day percentage drop in history.
He has always believed that everything in life can be fixed with a savvy PR strategy. Between his daddy’s money bailing him out and a willing media, it’s worked for him. But he doesn’t know what to do now and apparently, nobody around him does either (or, if they do, he won’t listen to them.) We must hope that the bureaucracy will somehow rise to the occasion and the state and local authorities can fill the gap.
I’ve always thought that Reagan’s quote, ““The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help ” was a ridiculously cutesy statement coming from a two-term president. But with Donald Trump in charge, for the first time, I think he had a point.