On January 16, 2020, as the Senate prepared to begin the historic impeachment trial, Tom Cotton, a fiercely conservative Republican senator from Arkansas, was studying disturbing news reports from China about the discovery of a novel, highly infectious virus in Hubei Province. Cotton focused on the discrepancy between the Chinese government speaking confidently about its handling of the virus and the increasingly urgent steps being taken to stop its spread. “That’s when it really crystallized for me,” Cotton later said. “Those two things obviously do not match.”1
Nearing the end of his first term, Cotton had earned a reputation as the most hawkish and one of the nastiest senators, which in McConnell’s Senate was no small achievement.2 Cotton also detested China’s communist regime, which might call into question his objectivity in assessing what was going on in China. But even Cotton’s strongest critics acknowledged his brainpower, and he brought to his work the background and insight from serving on both the Intelligence and the Armed Services Committees.
Cotton began pressing the White House to ban travel from China immediately. He worked the phones incessantly, calling, among others, President Trump, Jared Kushner, and Alex Azar (secretary of health and human services), alerting them to the dangers of the virus and urging them to ground all flights to and from China. Within days, Cotton’s views became so well known that White House officials understood what he meant when he pointed to the ground: his grim signal for getting the planes down.3
Aa Cotton placed urgent calls to the White House, President Trump was already downplaying the virus. “We have it totally under control,” Trump said on January 22. “It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be fine.”4
Early as he was in recognizing the threat, Cotton was not the first public official to become alarmed. In early January, Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser, received a call from a Hong Kong epidemiologist who was a longtime friend. The doctor’s message was blunt and urgent. A ferocious new outbreak that appeared similar to the SARS epidemic of 2003 had emerged. It had spread far more quickly than the government was admitting, and it would not be long before it reached other parts of the world. The virus, which started in the city of Wuhan, was being spread by people who showed no symptoms. “You need to be ready,” his friend stated.
Pottinger soon found that specialized corners of the intelligence community were producing similarly chilling reports, warning that the novel coronavirus was likely to spread across the globe, causing a pandemic. Within weeks of getting the initial information early in the year, biodefense experts within the NSC felt the need to begin planning what it would take to quarantine a city the size of Chicago. Pottinger began convening daily meetings of agency experts. On January 28, Robert O’Brien, Trump’s national security adviser, recommended to the president that he impose limits on travel from China. On January 29, Peter Navarro, Trump’s aggressive trade adviser and a longtime hawk on China, circulated a memo endorsing a travel ban, saying that failure to confront the outbreak could lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths and trillions of dollars in economic damage.
The leading public health experts were initially opposed to a travel ban, arguing that such bans were usually counterproductive because they prevented doctors from reaching affected areas while causing people to flee, which could spread the disease faster. But on January 30, the public health officials, led by Dr. Robert Redfield, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told Azar that they had changed their minds. The World Health Organization had declared a global health emergency, and American officials had identified the first case of person-to-person transmission in the United States. In an email to medical experts around the country, Dr. Carter Mecher, a senior medical adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs, was blunt. “Any way you cut it, this is going to be bad,” he wrote. “The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe.”5
On January 31, President Trump banned travel from China, an early action that he would cite proudly in the coming year. Although he had previously downplayed the threat, Trump’s action represented a relatively rapid response to the crisis posed by the novel coronavirus. It suggested a president who at least grasped the essence of the damage that the virus threatened if unchecked and who was prepared to take strong steps to protect the American people.
Over the next year, Trump’s repeated, worsening failures of leadership would condemn hundreds of thousands of Americans to needless deaths. Even Trump’s harshest critics did not anticipate the catastrophic magnitude of his failure when it was so obvious that strong leadership was in Trump’s political self-interest as well as in the public interest. And Trump was not alone in this; the US Senate also failed to show the courage, vision, independence, and steadiness to help steer our nation through the devastating harm caused by a once-in-a-century pandemic.
Among Trump’s many lies, two of the most damaging would be his assertions that no one could have anticipated a pandemic and that he “inherited practically nothing” in pandemic preparedness from the Obama administration. In fact, the serious possibility of a pandemic had been widely discussed for at least fifteen years, going back to the original SARS coronavirus. Bill Gates gave a talk at the TED conference in 2015 about the threat of a pandemic that received twenty million views on YouTube. Gates said that a pandemic is “the most likely thing, by far, to kill over 10 million excess people in a year” and then forecast a “better than 50/50 chance” that we would see a global pandemic that kills more than thirty million people in his lifetime.6
To his lasting credit, President George W. Bush became alarmed by the threat of a pandemic during his term in office, and he took vigorous action to protect the United States and the world community against such a catastrophe.7 Bush addressed the United Nations on the need for global cooperation to combat potential pandemics and pressed for legislation to prepare the United States. In December 2006, Congress enacted the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act, whose sections include “national preparedness and response leadership, organization and planning,” “public health security preparedness,” “all-hazards medical surge capacity,” and “pandemic and biodefense vaccine and drug development”—unmistakably clear indications of the threat that the Bush administration and Congress anticipated the need to meet.
The Obama administration began building on the legislation immediately after coming into office in 2009. At Obama’s first meeting with the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) in June of that year, he asked what his administration needed to do to prepare for an influenza pandemic. He met frequently with John Holdren, the White House science adviser, and ordered an interagency task force to work on a pandemic preparedness plan. Over the course of Obama’s presidency, a pandemic infrastructure was put in place.8
The administration faced the challenge of a potential Ebola outbreak in 2014, and two years later Ron Klain, the administration’s Ebola czar, wrote an article on the persistent threat: “As the next President maps out plans to combat war and climate change, terrorism and ethnic conflict, humanitarian challenges and sectarian strife, he or she should make a high priority of the national security threat that has killed more humans than all wars, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters combined: infectious diseases. . . . The single most likely cause of a nightmare scenario is not any of the oft-discussed threats, but an oft-overlooked one: pandemic illness.”9 During the transition in 2016–2017, the Obama administration handed the incoming Trump team a sixty-nine-page playbook, written to coordinate a response to an emergency disease threat anywhere in the world.10
Donald Trump chose to take the opposite course. “Beginning the morning after his inauguration, a spectacular science-related tragedy has unfolded. The Trump administration has systemically dismantled the executive branch’s scientific infrastructure and rejected the role of science to inform policy,” wrote Dr. Jason Karlawish, professor of medicine and bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. With his passion for using a wrecking ball on all of Obama’s accomplishments, Trump dismantled PCAST on his third day in office. He also chose not to appoint a White House science adviser until his third year in office, and PCAST was not reconstituted until November 2019. At a PCAST meeting on February 3 and 4, four days after Trump banned travel from China, there was no discussion of the novel coronavirus that had prompted the ban.11
Congressional leaders were aware of the wide-ranging economic and security impacts posed by infectious diseases. The House Intelligence Committee had included a specific provision on pandemics in the Intelligence Authorization Act encompassing 2018, 2019, and 2020, requiring the director of national intelligence to submit a report “on the anticipated geopolitical effects of emerging infectious disease . . . and pandemics, and their implications on the national security of the United States.” Nevertheless, many of the programs created under the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act had their funding cut to dangerously low levels even before Trump took office. The Strategic National Stockpile, funded at levels 50–60 percent of what was needed, was seriously short of masks and ventilators when the pandemic hit.12
On January 24, at the urging of Senator Lamar Alexander, administration officials came to the Senate to provide a classified briefing. Only fourteen senators attended, in part because the briefing was scheduled on short notice, and in part because that was the day on which their impeachment questions had to be submitted. A White House official expressed surprise at the “incredibly” poor attendance, noting that it came “even though the amount of concern expressed then was rather intense.” Alexander and three Republican colleagues issued a bland statement thanking the administration for the briefing but conveying no real sense of alarm or urgency.
Nevertheless, on January 28, Chuck Schumer and Washington’s two Democratic senators, Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, wrote to Azar, demanding to be kept apprised of “the latest information regarding the severity of the disease, the country’s capacity to diagnose cases, what steps were being taken to prepare U.S. health care workers, what screening systems were in place at U.S. airports, and the status of a novel coronavirus vaccine.” At the time, just five cases of coronavirus had been identified in the United States. A week later, at a briefing with Azar on February 5, Democrats began pushing for emergency supplemental funds to combat the virus. “They aren’t taking this seriously enough,” Senator Chris Murphy tweeted after leaving the briefing, referring to his Republican colleagues. “Notably, no request for ANY emergency funding, which is a big mistake. Local health systems need supplies, training, screening staff etc. And they need it now.”13 He would later recall, “Senate Republicans were not using February to pressure the president to get serious about an early supplemental [appropriations] request.”14
February was the crucial month, and the Senate missed the opportunity to work with the administration or to use its own powers to pressure the administration to act. Some senators who were in positions to exert leadership focused instead on financial self-interest. Richard Burr had done a distinguished job of leading the Intelligence Committee’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential campaign; he also had a long and commendable record in supporting pandemic preparedness, through his service on the Senate Health Committee. But his actions when news of the pandemic emerged did not have the public’s interest in mind. On February 13, Burr and his wife sold thirty-three stocks worth between $628,000 and $1.7 million, including several hundred thousand dollars of stock in hotel chains.
At the same time, Burr wrote an opinion piece for Fox News suggesting that the United States was “better prepared than ever before” to combat the virus, but he conveyed his actual view two weeks later to the Tar Heel Club, a nonpartisan North Carolina business group visiting Washington. Burr warned the group that the virus would soon cause a major disruption in the United States. “There’s one thing I can tell you about this. It’s much more aggressive in its transmission than anything we have seen in recent history,” said Burr, in a recording obtained by NPR, which reported his remarks. “It’s probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic.” He added, “Every company should be cognizant of the fact that you may have to alter your travel. You may have to look at your employees and judge whether the trip they’re making to Europe is essential or whether it can be done on video conference.”15
Burr, at least, had a record of some distinction in the Senate against which his decision to sell stocks based on confidential information could be balanced. In contrast, Kelly Loeffler, a multimillionaire businesswoman, had recently been appointed to the Senate by Georgia’s governor to fill the seat vacated when Johnny Isakson resigned because of ill health. Loeffler had been in the Senate barely two months before she took advantage of confidential information about the virus to sell stock.16
The novel coronavirus would spread exponentially; before long, there would be thousands of additional infections, illnesses, and deaths. During the crucial weeks in January and early February, Mitch McConnell’s focus was on the impeachment trial. After Trump was acquitted on February 5, McConnell took his victory lap and then turned back to his highest priority: the conveyor belt that carried right-wing lawyers onto the federal bench. For the next three weeks, McConnell made no public statements about the virus. If he was exercising any leadership behind the scenes, it was not reported.
On February 27, McConnell did speak thoughtfully about the virus on the Senate floor. “The continued spread of Covid-19 has the world on notice. Here in the United States, we are fortunate not to be facing an immediate crisis,” he stated. “But obviously, as our public health experts remind us, a nation of nearly four million square miles and more than 300 million people cannot be hermetically sealed off from the rest of the world. There seems to be little question that Covid-19 will eventually cause some degree of disruption here. . . . In Congress, it’s our job to ensure that funding is not a limiting factor as public health leaders and front-line medical professionals continue getting ready.” But McConnell then attacked Schumer, who had been pushing for urgent action, for “reflexive partisanship . . . moving the goal posts . . . and a strange and clumsy effort to override the normal appropriations process.” This was no time, McConnell commented dryly, for “performative outrage.” He was confident that the necessary funding legislation would be considered by the Senate in two weeks.17
COVID-19 became the dominant reality in American life in the week starting on March 9. In just a few days, with shocking speed, America went from normal life to a complete standstill, as schools, airports, subways, businesses, and restaurants all shut down. The Centers for Disease Control urged Americans to refrain from flying. On March 13, the House rushed to pass a significant coronavirus relief package, which was hammered out in intense negotiations between Speaker Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, a package that included free testing, paid emergency leave for a limited time, unemployment insurance, and increased funds for food stamps. Trump proclaimed a national emergency, which he described as “two very big words.”18
McConnell chose not to be involved, leaving the negotiations to Pelosi and Mnuchin. “The Secretary of the Treasury will have ball control for the administration. I expect he will speak for us as well,” McConnell commented.19 Undeterred by the CDC guidance and the rapidly escalating crisis, McConnell recessed the Senate for the weekend and flew to Lexington to attend the swearing-in of Justin Walker to be a federal district judge for the Eastern District of Kentucky. Walker had some excellent credentials, having graduated from Harvard Law School and clerked for Brett Kavanaugh on the D.C. Circuit and for Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court. But because he was only thirty-seven years old and had never tried a case, the American Bar Association gave him an “unqualified” rating for a federal judge-ship. However, Walker was the son of a leading McConnell donor and an outspoken right-wing legal thinker and a darling of the Federalist Society, in which he had held leadership roles ever since law school.
Justice Kavanaugh also took the time to fly to Kentucky for the swearing-in, which became something of a right-wing pep rally. “What can I say that hasn’t already been said on Fox News?” Judge Walker said, minutes after being sworn in. “In Brett Kava naugh’s America, we will not surrender while you wage war on our work, or our cause, or our hope, or our dream. . . . Although we are winning, we have not won. Although we celebrate today, we cannot take for granted tomorrow—or we will lose our courts and our country to critics who call us terrifying and who describe us as deplorable.”20
Mid-March was a dystopian nightmare for America, with empty streets, shuttered businesses, and rapidly filling hospitals and morgues. Frontline workers were struggling to cope despite shortages of personal protective equipment, and the country was flying blind about the scope of the problem because of grossly insufficient testing. Immediate government action on a massive scale was needed. Pelosi, Schumer, and the Democrats had been providing leadership, along with Mnuchin. It took another week before McConnell finally recognized the magnitude of the crisis and the danger of being a leader who was missing in action. He mobilized the Senate Republicans to formulate a comprehensive bill, with a stunning $1 trillion price tag, which was introduced on March 19.
Over the next week, Americans would see their politicians working at their best in a frenetic effort to produce an unprecedented response to an unprecedented crisis. Each side took its share of partisan shots. “She’s the Speaker of the House, not the Speaker of the Senate,” McConnell said. “And we were doing fine before her intervention.”21 Schumer and Pelosi criticized McConnell’s proposal for “putting corporations way ahead of workers.”22 Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut excoriated McConnell’s proposal for funneling hundreds of billions of dollars to private companies without requiring binding commitments to preserve jobs and wages. McConnell repeatedly cited a statement by Representative James Clyburn, the number three Democrat in the House, overheard in a private call, that the pandemic provided “a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to our vision.”23 Schumer led the Democrats in refusing McConnell’s “take it or leave it” offer to increase small business loans by $500 billion, because it did not include $150 billion for hospitals.
But generally, partisanship was kept under control because of the need to respond to the crisis. In a private meeting with Republican senators, McConnell told them they would have to accommodate “Cryin’ Chuck,” Trump’s derisive nickname for Schumer. With a Democratic House and a closely divided Senate, he knew that the only way forward was bipartisan compromise.24
On March 27, the Senate unanimously approved the CARES Act, a $2 trillion economic stabilization plan to respond to the coronavirus pandemic through a combination of direct payments and benefits for individuals, money for states, and a huge bailout fund for businesses. The legislation would send direct payments of $1,200 to millions of Americans earning up to $75,000 and an additional $500 per child. It substantially increased jobless aid, providing an additional thirteen weeks and a four-month enhancement of benefits, with an extra $600 per week on top of the ordinary state benefits. The package also provided unemployment benefits for the first time to freelancers and gig workers. The measure offered $377 billion in federal guaranteed loans to small businesses and established a $500 billion government lending program for distressed companies, including allowing the government to take an equity stake in the airlines that were devastated by the abrupt loss of more than 90 percent of their passengers. The legislation also provided $100 billion to hospitals on the front lines of the pandemic.
It was a stunning result; the negotiators had acted with extraordinary speed, creativity, and generosity, coming through for the American people with the largest economic relief program in history, almost three times larger than the economic stimulus in early 2009. In the coming months, analysts would show that billions of dollars went to companies that did not need the money and that the Trump administration undercut the oversight that Congress had built into the legislation by establishing a special inspector general. But there is no doubt that CARES provided a lifeline to millions of Americans facing economic disaster because of the virus.
When the legislation passed, fewer than one thousand Americans had died of COVID-19. CARES was the third legislative response to the pandemic. No one doubted that further action and much more money would be needed. Pelosi instructed the relevant House committees to begin formulating a fourth legislative package.25
McConnell and his Senate had proven that it could legislate for the country—at least when Trump was being rational, recognizing the crisis, and empowering Mnuchin to negotiate. Unfortunately, America needed senators and a Senate that could step up when Trump was irrational, which was most of the time, and a bad period was about to start. Within days after the enactment of the CARES Act, as infections from the virus exploded, Trump was still talking about opening the country up by Easter. He took over the daily briefings of the White House coronavirus task force, expressing optimism that had no basis, spreading disinformation, and advocating quack cures, such as injecting disinfectant. Disclaiming any responsibility for leadership, Trump said that the governors were in charge of the response. On April 17, in the middle of what was supposed to be a thirty-day extension of the initial fifteen-day period of lockdown to “slow the spread,” Trump went on a rampage against several Democratic governors, tweeting “Liberate Minnesota,” “Liberate Michigan,” “Liberate Virginia.”26
Rather than speaking out against Trump’s rants, McConnell returned to partisanship. On April 22, McConnell issued a strong statement opposing any kind of aid to states, saying that those suffering revenue shortfalls should consider bankruptcy. This was an explicit rejection of the Democrats’ plea to help state governments. Underscoring McConnell’s partisan point, his staff issued a news release titled “Stopping Blue State Bailouts.”
Andrew Cuomo, the Democratic governor of New York, criticized McConnell for distinguishing among states based on their political leanings, rather than “states where people are dying. . . . Not red and blue. Red, white and blue. They’re just Americans dying.” But McConnell made it clear that he was approaching any additional relief funding very cautiously. “We’d certainly insist that anything we’d borrow to send down to the states is not spent on solving problems they created for themselves over the years with their pension programs,” the majority leader said.27
By late April, it was clear that the strategy of containing the novel coronavirus through testing and contact tracing was not going to work. The virus could be stopped only by the development of an effective vaccine. If history provided any indication, that could take several years, although the massive global effort underway was already showing great promise. Until a vaccine could be developed, slowing the virus would depend on relatively simple, common-sense steps: wearing a mask and social distancing.
While McConnell was sharpening the red-blue divide, he tried to provide some common sense and responsible leadership about wearing masks and social distancing. “There is no stigma to wearing a mask. There is no stigma to staying six feet apart. . . . You have an obligation to others,” McConnell said at an event aired in Kentucky in late May. He described masking and maintaining social distance as a means of bringing the country back to normal.28
Unfortunately, Trump hated the idea of masks. He did not like the way he looked in a mask, so he chose to mock those who wore them, particularly his likely general election opponent, Joe Biden. He accused a Reuters reporter of being “politically correct” for not removing his mask when asking a question in the White House briefing room. He visited a Ford plant and took off his mask, telling reporters that he didn’t want to give them the pleasure of seeing him wear it.29
The results were immediate and predictable. No one could deny the intense loyalty of Trump’s millions of followers, and masks, improbably and disastrously, became the central issue in the political culture war. Masks were seen as unmanly and an imposition on personal freedom. Most Republican governors quickly joined the opposition to masks, either because they agreed with Trump or because they lacked the courage to differ with him.
Starting around Memorial Day, people began shaking off the restraints of COVID and congregating without masks around the country. Many gathered outside, which reduced the transmission of the virus, but there were such large crowds in bars and around swimming pools that infections spread. By June, large parts of the South and the Midwest faced a second wave of surging infections.30
By late June, virtually all the Republican senators had begun wearing masks and speaking out about their importance. Tim Scott of South Carolina tweeted that wearing a mask “is one of the simplest and easiest ways to help stop the spread of #Covid-19.” Chuck Grassley, the second-oldest member of the Senate, posted a photo of himself on Instagram wearing a mask, with the caption “everybody’s got to do their share.” Shelley Moore Capito said, “We’re going to be required to wear it. . . . I think [President Trump] should be leading the effort, yeah.” Rick Scott, one of the president’s strongest supporters, said, “I think mayors, governors, the president, they have a responsibility . . . to be talking about masks more, and social distancing.”31
At a June 30 hearing, Lamar Alexander, the Senate Health Committee chair, plaintively urged Trump to end the “political debate” around face coverings: “Unfortunately, this simple life saving practice has become part of a political debate that says: If you’re for Trump, you don’t wear a mask. If you’re against Trump, you do. That is why I have suggested that the president occasionally wear a mask even though there are not many occasions where it is necessary for him to do so. The president has millions of admirers. They would follow his lead” (emphasis added).
It was actually as simple as that. Had Trump endorsed mask wearing as a useful protective step to reduce transmission of the virus, his millions of admirers would have worn masks. Not every one of them, but probably 90 percent. By this time, even Sean Hannity and Steve Doocy, two of Trump’s most fervent Fox News supporters, had joined the ranks of mask advocates. Republican governors would not have gone against Trump; the virus could have been contained and hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved.
At least Hannity and Doocy were trying—better late than never. The shocking truth, which concerned Senate Republicans should have grasped, was that there was never a time to talk reason to Trump. “I’d prefer he do it [wear a mask]. You know he’s not going to do it,” said Florida’s Marco Rubio. America was in the grip of a mad king, and the situation was about to get worse.
Every biography about Trump (including the one written by his niece, Mary Trump, a psychologist) makes it clear that he grew up without a capacity for empathy. There is not a shred of evidence that Trump cared about the several million people who were ill or dying from COVID. He was angry that the pandemic had ruined “the greatest economy in U.S. history” and threatened his reelection.32 Of course, Trump still had a path to win in November, particularly given the miraculous pace at which vaccines were being developed, but that path required calling for masks and social distancing to limit the spread of the virus until a vaccine would be available. Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager, came up with an alternative approach: Trump would excite his base by holding the rallies he loved, which would also provide a contrast to Joe Biden, who was staying in his home in Delaware and wearing a mask on the few occasions he came outside.33
Parscale invited a million of Trump’s admirers to a massive indoor rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The rally was originally scheduled for June 19, a particularly tone-deaf choice since it was the anniversary of the brutal 1921 riots in which more than three hundred African Americans were murdered and hundreds of businesses destroyed in the Greenwood district of Tulsa. Across the country, American cities were rocked by Black Lives Matter demonstrations triggered by the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis policeman on May 25. The Trump campaign was quite willing to exploit racial tensions for political gain, but in this case, Parscale decided to put off the rally by a day, rescheduling it for June 20.
Across Oklahoma, a state Trump won in 2016 by thirty-six points, there was shock that the president would invite his followers to a massive indoor rally during a pandemic. Officials in Tulsa warned that the planned rally was likely to worsen an already troubling spike in cases and could become a disastrous “super-spreader” event. They pleaded with Trump to cancel the event, or at least move it out of doors.
“It’s a perfect storm of potential over-the-top disease transmission,” said Bruce Dart, the executive director of the Tulsa Health Department. “There’s nothing good about this, particularly in an enclosed arena,” said Karen Keith, a Tulsa county commissioner. “I don’t want people to lose a family member over this.”34 Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt asked Trump and Vice President Pence, who planned to attend the rally, to consider a large outdoor venue instead.
Trump tweeted that forty thousand people would be attending, and that “Almost One Million people” had requested tickets. He said the news media was “trying to Covid shame us on our big Rallies” and accused the media of a double standard since they had not criticized the George Floyd rallies occurring around the country as possible COVID spreaders. The Trump campaign, ever prudent, required attendees to sign a waiver saying they would not sue if they contracted the virus at the rally.35
Trump had failed catastrophically in his leadership in the previous six months, with the notable exception of his commitment to Operation Warp Speed, the accelerated development of a vaccine. He had been derelict in his duties: negligent, irresponsible, and guilty of spreading dangerous misinformation. He continually refused to accept the advice of public health officials, and he could not bring himself to endorse masks and social distancing, which would have had a profound effect on the transmission of the virus. Now he had crossed another line, actually inviting his followers to a potential super-spreader event. When America most needed a focused, effective president, drawing on the public health and economic advice available, the occupant of the White House acted more like the leader of an apocalyptic cult.
Trump’s followers were fervent, but they were not completely oblivious to the danger of an indoor rally. On June 20, the arena looked like an ad for social distancing, with many empty seats, though most of the crowd did not take the precaution of wearing masks. An outdoor stage, set up to accommodate the expected overflow crowd, went unused. Trump, who drew strength from adoring crowds, was plainly thrown off by the low turnout. He gave a disjointed seventy-four-minute speech in which he congratulated himself for a “phenomenal job” fighting the pandemic. He railed about the “left-wing radicals,” whom he falsely charged with rioting in cities all around the country.36 The most recognizable person in the audience was Herman Cain, the former chairman and CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, one of the few prominent black Republican leaders, who had run a surprisingly strong campaign for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012. Sadly, on July 30 Cain died from COVID-19, almost certainly contracted at Trump’s rally.
The July 4 holiday marked a grim milestone, as the number of coronavirus infections in America reached three million. In the Senate, Mitch McConnell and his fellow Republicans could comfort themselves by pointing to their statements encouraging Trump to endorse mask wearing. It is interesting to consider what more they could reasonably have been expected to do. One possibility for increasing their impact would have been a joint statement by many, if not all, of the Republican senators. Alternatively, they could have acknowledged the reality that nothing would change Trump, and therefore he needed to be restrained in some way or even removed through another impeachment trial or by the cabinet invoking the Twenty-Fifth Amendment on the grounds of presidential disability.37 McConnell was particularly well situated to explore such action, since his wife, Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao, was perhaps the most experienced person in Trump’s cabinet. But if impeachment or the Twenty-Fifth Amendment were a bridge too far, McConnell and his Republican colleagues could have pressed Trump to let Vice President Pence take responsibility for the administration’s response to the virus, allowing the president to focus on other issues, including his reelection campaign.
Viewing the “chaos president” three years earlier, Jeff Flake had expressed frustration and fear: “Congress was designed to assert itself in just such moments. . . . Too often we observe the unfolding drama along with the rest of the country, passively all but saying ‘someone should do something’ without seeming to realize that someone is us.” If America had been attacked by an unexpected but lethal adversary, would the Senate Republicans leave a completely irrational president in the White House with hundreds of thousands of American lives at risk? We know the answer: they would and they did.
Lindsey Graham had been vocal on virtually every issue, particularly when it came to defending Trump and casting doubt on the investigation of Russia’s interference in American elections. But Graham, to his credit, was trying to use his close relationship with Trump in the summer of 2020 to move the president to a more rational position on the virus. Trump spent hours at night on the phone, feeling sorry for himself and talking to people, like Rudy Giuliani, who reinforced his worst instincts, and Graham was a frequent caller. Graham, however, worried that Trump was not willing to own the coronavirus problem and told him, “You need to explain to the country, we’re not helpless against the virus. Here’s the game plan to beat the virus.” Graham told Trump that his opponent wasn’t Biden; it was the virus. “People will have a hard time attacking you if you follow the advice of Birx and Fauci and stay in close touch with governors about a plan to open up the economy.”38
The Senate Republicans could also have joined in the effort to pass a further coronavirus relief package. The House passed a $3.5 trillion HEROES relief package in May. Now, at the end of June, the Senate began to consider what they would be willing to do. The $600 weekly unemployment benefits were scheduled to end on July 31; so was the moratorium on housing evictions. These had been lifelines for millions of Americans; the need for further legislation was pressing.39
But McConnell had other priorities: his own reelection campaign and the judicial conveyor belt. He again left the negotiations to Pelosi, Schumer, and Mnuchin, weighing in only occasionally to criticize their work when they appeared to be making progress. “The Speaker of the House and the Democratic leader are continuing to say our way or the highway. These are not the tactics that would build a bipartisan result. About twenty of my members think we’ve done enough,” McConnell told the PBS news anchor Judy Woodruff in late July.40 He expressed concern about the mounting national debt and prioritized an immunity shield to protect businesses from COVID lawsuits. Once again, as with Grassley’s criminal justice reform bill, McConnell seemed to want to pass legislation only if all his Republican colleagues were on board. It was impossible to find a solution that would be acceptable to right-wing senators like Ted Cruz that was also acceptable to Pelosi and Schumer. Consequently, nothing happened, and the Republicans faced the possibility of significant political damage.
On July 31, as new jobless claims exceeded one million for the nineteenth straight week, expanded unemployment benefits expired, reducing the average unemployment check by almost two-thirds.41 On August 8, the Paycheck Protection Act expired, with almost $138 billion unspent.42 The desperate situation facing millions of Americans prompted President Trump to issue executive orders using $44 billion from the Disaster Relief Fund to provide extra unemployment benefits, continuing student loan payment relief, deferring collection of employee Social Security payroll taxes, and identifying options to help Americans avoid eviction and foreclosure.43
Most Senate Republicans recognized that many of their constituents desperately needed help. They also realized their political fate might depend on whether a massive pandemic relief package could be enacted. But McConnell was unmoved. When the August recess came, the senators went home without having taken any action. It had been five months since the House had passed the HEROES act.
September began with the bombshell revelations from Bob Woodward, the legendary Washington Post journalist and author of twenty-two books, that Trump had deliberately downplayed the danger of the virus. “This is deadly stuff. . . . It’s so easily transmissible you wouldn’t believe it,” Trump had told Woodward in February and April interviews. “I always wanted to play it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”44 Many commentators criticized Trump for hiding the truth from the American people. Others, who tended to be Trump supporters, found it comforting to find out that he knew the virus was serious.
By mid-September, the United States had recorded its two hundred thousandth death from COVID-19. And while there were exciting, reliable reports of remarkable progress in vaccine development, the public health and economic consequences of the virus for America were devastating. In Kentucky, polls showed McConnell with a large lead over his Democratic challenger, Amy McGrath, and he seemed poised to secure his seventh term in the Senate.45 Yet, despite the national crisis, McConnell and his Republican hard-liners continued to block urgently needed relief. Like Trump, McConnell was missing the empathy gene. The powerful majority leader seemed curiously disengaged, indifferent to the suffering sweeping the country. He was waiting for a challenge worthy of his full energy, and he would not have to wait any longer.