TWENTY-THREE
By late June 2020, coronavirus cases were surging. But Trump was determined to revive his trademark arena rallies, teeming with cheering supporters in red hats and carrying signs. He dearly missed them.
A large rally at Tulsa, Oklahoma’s 19,000-seat BOK Center was scheduled for June 20, his first in 60 days. City health officials, however, worried about a “super-spreader event,” and urged him to cancel it.
A day before, Trump told Woodward in an interview the rally would be a huge success.
“I have a rally tomorrow night in Oklahoma,” Trump said. “Over 1.2 million people have signed up. We can only take about 50, 60 thousand. Because, you know, it’s a big arena, right? But we can take 22,000 in one arena, 40,000 in another. We’re going to have two arenas loaded. But think of that. Nobody ever had rallies like that.”
At the rally, the arena was only about half-filled, if that, with a sea of empty blue seats facing Trump, partly the result of a social media prank organized by teenage Trump critics. Thousands of them registered for a ticket, never intending to show up.
Trump later erupted about his campaign manager, Brad Parscale. At 6-foot-8 and bearded, Parscale looked like a professional wrestler in a suit. He had gained national notice for his digital efforts and for organizing Trump supporters on social media platforms like Facebook.
“Biggest fucking mistake,” Trump said at a meeting in the Oval Office. “I shouldn’t have ever done that fucking, fucking rally,” calling Parscale a “fucking moron.”
Parscale was fired as campaign manager July 15 and demoted to senior adviser.
Not long after, at another July meeting in the Oval Office, his pollster, Tony Fabrizio, said that voters, especially independents, were emotionally drained.
“Well, to be honest, Mr. President,” Fabrizio said, “the voters are just fatigued. They’re tired of the chaos. They’re tired of the tumult.”
Normally solicitous with Fabrizio, who had helped his 2016 campaign, Trump snapped his head around.
“Oh, they’re tired?” Trump said loudly and in a rage. “They’re fucking tired? Well, I’m fucking fatigued and tired, too.”
The Oval Office went dead silent.
Then Fabrizio raised Biden, and Trump was immediately dismissive. “He’s old,” Trump said. “He’s not up to it. You know, he can’t even string together a sentence.”
“You can’t make him into a crazy liberal,” Fabrizio said. “I don’t think people will buy it.”
Fabrizio knew he had broken his pick with Trump, but the president continued to look for something, or someone, to shore up his flagging campaign.
The White House and campaign reached into every corner, consulting with former House speaker Newt Gingrich and even with Dick Morris, a discredited Bill Clinton campaign adviser.
“If you are perceived as having failed during a time of crisis, you cannot come back. Think Neville Chamberlain or Herbert Hoover,” Morris wrote in one summer email to Trump’s senior advisers, referring to the British prime minister known for his disastrous meetings with Hitler and the president remembered for the Great Depression.
Trump remained defiant amid the worldwide health crisis. On August 7, he decided on an apparent whim to hold a news conference at his New Jersey golf club.
The pandemic “is disappearing,” he insisted. “It’s going to disappear.” Cases in the U.S. had reached nearly 4.9 million confirmed cases—and over 160,000 deaths. Schools were, for the most part, not scheduled to reopen.
“The deep state,” Trump tweeted two weeks later, “or whoever, over at the FDA, is making it very difficult for drug companies to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics. Obviously, they are hoping to delay the answer until after November 3rd. Must focus on speed and saving lives!”
The “whoever” was Dr. Stephen Hahn, 60, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.
A Trump appointee, Hahn had been the prestigious chief medical executive of the MD Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas and had published more than 220 peer-reviewed articles during his medical career. He also was a regular donor to Republican candidates.
A skilled political player from his years in the sharp-elbowed world of academic medicine, Hahn had a strained relationship with Meadows, who was under pressure from Trump to expedite the process.
“He definitely wanted me to speed up, and he wanted the data. He wanted information so that he could talk to the president,” Hahn said to a colleague.
“When I talked to him about the process we were using, he would mention that he worked for some consulting firm and was experienced in, you know, process and process improvement. And that we had gotten it all wrong and we had too many steps involved in this analysis.
“He didn’t bother to ask questions about why certain steps were needed. He didn’t see that there was any validity to what I was saying with respect to our process.”
After Trump’s “deep state” tweet, Hahn immediately called the president.
“I want to reiterate that no one is blocking anything,” Hahn said. Producing a vaccine is a complicated procedure governed by laws, and the vaccine manufacturers and government agencies were already fast-tracking the process at record speed, working in partnership with the Trump administration’s “Operation Warp Speed” initiative.
“We are not slowing down enrollment of the trials. We’re trying our best in terms of getting data and information,” he said. This has nothing to do with politics. He tried to explain the clinical trial process to Trump.
The FDA is a regulator and follows strict guidelines to determine whether and when a vaccine is safe and efficacious for use by the general public in the U.S. It does not produce the vaccine. A typical vaccine usually takes around 10 to 15 years to create. The mumps vaccine, the fastest ever developed, took four years.
“Look,” Hahn said. “These clinical trials are set up by companies, by the NIH,” the National Institutes of Health.
The vaccine was being developed by companies like Pfizer-BioNTech, Johnson & Johnson, and Moderna. They conducted the scientific study, including laboratory research and nonclinical trials in animals before then applying to the FDA for permission to begin multiphased clinical human trials.
“While FDA has oversight over clinical research, it does not conduct the trials,” Hahn said again. Its role is to evaluate the data submitted by the companies to determine safety and efficacy.
“I’m proud of you,” Trump said, changing tune completely and putting an end to the conversation. He seemed embarrassed and didn’t talk about his tweet.
Hahn realized the president had no idea how the FDA operated and had made no effort to find out before sending the tweet. It was a classic tweet-burst, ignorant and disruptive. Trump did not understand the power of his words. Public faith in safety procedures was critical to convincing people to get vaccinated.
Hahn did not ask the president whether he ever considered what thousands of FDA workers might think when they read the statements attacking their work from the president of the United States.