TWENTY-FIVE
Trump had seethed for weeks over news coverage of his retreat into the White House’s bunker. His rage flashed again on August 10, when he was in the White House briefing room answering questions.
A Secret Service agent interrupted Trump and pulled him out of the room, into a waiting area for the White House press office.
“There were shots fired outside,” the agent told the president.
Trump scowled.
“I’m not going in the fucking bunker,” he said.
A day later, shortly after Biden’s vice presidential announcement, Trump tweeted. “Kamala Harris started strong in the Democrat Primaries, and finished weak, ultimately fleeing the race with almost zero support. That’s the kind of opponent everyone dreams of!”
The Trump campaign followed up with a video—“Slow Joe and Phony Kamala,” a narrator’s voice said. “Perfect together, wrong for America.”
Outside Trump adviser Dick Morris later emailed the president’s pollsters and campaign officials. He wondered if the Harris pick could be weaponized.
“Is Biden easy to manipulate? We know he is weak and feeble, but does it follow that he can be unduly influenced by staff, consultants, and donors? Can we say that he chose Harris because the black leaders told him to do so? Can we cite his embrace of the radical agenda as a successful manipulation by Bernie’s people?”
Inside the Trump campaign, which was now being run by veteran New Jersey political operative Bill Stepien after Brad Parscale was demoted, there was mounting frustration. Trump’s numbers were sagging. Outsiders like Dick Morris and Sean Hannity had too much influence, feeding him ideas and advice that cut against poll-tested strategy.
On Wednesday, September 23, at 8:20 a.m., Trump adviser Jason Miller emailed Stepien and the campaign’s pollsters, John McLaughlin and Tony Fabrizio. The subject line: “Was this new poll shared with Dick Morris???”
Fabrizio responded at 11:23 a.m., writing “the President had told me to share numbers with him.”
Miller responded three minutes later.
Well, that was a fuck up.
Now he’s “threatening” to tell the President our numbers have “tanked.”
I don’t want anybody talking to Dick Morris about anything ever.
In late September, the FDA submitted guidelines on its process for emergency approval of the coronavirus vaccines to the White House. For over two weeks, they waited for a sign-off. The holdup was Mark Meadows. He was concerned there were too many unnecessary steps in the FDA authorization process. It would take too long.
For Hahn, it was another intervention by Meadows, the brash former North Carolina businessman, weighing in as a supposed expert on FDA process, even though he was not a doctor.
The guidelines called for Phase 3 studies to include a two-month follow-up period to see whether participants reported any serious side effects.
Peter Marks, the director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research at the FDA, had a PhD in cell and molecular biology and was working arm in arm with Hahn on the approval process.
“It was stunning to me that Mark Meadows thought he knew more than Peter Marks, with respect to how to evaluate the safety and efficacy of a vaccine,” Hahn told others. “He thinks he knows things that he doesn’t know and has expertise that he doesn’t have.”
Seven former FDA commissioners published an op-ed in The Washington Post on September 29 asking the White House to let the FDA do its job: “The White House has said it might try to influence the scientific standards for vaccine approval put forward by the FDA.
“This pronouncement came just after key leaders at the FDA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health all publicly supported the guidance,” they wrote. “Drug makers have also pledged to use the FDA’s scientific standards.”
Later that same evening, at the first presidential debate, held in Cleveland, Trump said, “I’ve spoken to Pfizer, I’ve spoken to all of the people that you have to speak to, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and others.”
“We’re weeks away from a vaccine,” Trump claimed, insisting the companies “can go faster.” Despite all his rhetoric playing down the virus, Trump knew a vaccine before the election could help him politically.
Pfizer’s chief executive Albert Bourla joined the chorus of voices in the scientific community trying to shift the president’s tactics and tone.
“Once more, I was disappointed that the prevention for a deadly disease was discussed in political terms rather than scientific facts,” Bourla said in an open letter to colleagues.
During a debate prep session in the fall, Biden asked Ron Klain, “Have you thought about what you want to do after the campaign is over?”
“If you win,” Klain said, “I would be interested in coming back and serving.”
“Would you think about being my chief of staff?”
“I’m honored, flattered you would think of me,” Klain said. “I think we’re going to have a real mess on our hands if you win. I’d love to be part of it.”
“Look, I’m superstitious,” Biden said, keeping all the options for himself. “I’m not going to offer anybody any jobs until after I’m elected. But it’s important to me to have in my mind that you would do this.”
“Yes,” Klain said. “You know if you offer me that job, I will accept.”
Klain’s prediction months earlier, during that private meeting in Delaware, came true at the first Trump-Biden debate. Nothing was out of bounds, including Biden’s family.
Trump was aggressive and angry—needling and interrupting Biden. “Will you shut up, man?” Biden asked with exasperation. It was the line of the night.
President Trump’s hospitalization with the coronavirus, late Friday, October 2, briefly ruptured his campaign’s final stretch, with Trump helicoptered to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.
Trump had resisted going. But when his blood oxygen levels plummeted into the 80s range, a potentially fatal zone, and the president had trouble breathing, his physician had to give him oxygen. Several aides warned he would have to be taken out in a wheelchair or worse if he did not go. He agreed to board Marine One and head over to Bethesda.
Once hospitalized, Trump’s condition stabilized. Trump was given what his doctors called an “antibody cocktail,” including Regeneron, an antibody treatment that was still in its clinical trial phase. U.S. health officials went into a frenzy to secure FDA approval for Trump’s use of the drug and debated whether it was appropriate for him, with his obesity at age 74, to take the cocktail, according to the Washington Post’s Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta.
“Enjoy your hospital food,” Kellyanne Conway told Trump on the phone during his three-night stint at the hospital.
Months earlier, when Conway was in a home-based quarantine after contracting the virus, Trump had buoyed her spirits.
“You have zero percent body fat, honey,” Trump said. “Honey, if you have zero percent body fat, you’re fine.”
He was released on October 5, theatrically removing his mask from the White House balcony, then flashing thumbs-up and saluting at Marine One.
The White House remained a hot zone for infection. Meadows and other senior staffers eschewed masks and low-level staffers felt the office culture seemed to encourage ignoring public health guidelines. They sat through meeting after meeting where missives from Fauci and others were derided by Trump and his aides as preachy and liberal. At least “34 White House staffers and other contacts” had contracted the virus, noted an internal memo from FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, in October.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell kept watch on Biden’s understated general election campaign. He thought the Biden campaign was clever in styling him as a moderate—the calm grandfather from Delaware versus a wild Republican incumbent. Almost any Democrat was certain to be elected after voters observed Trump’s behavior.
“Being Donald Trump,” McConnell told others, was enough for Trump to lose in November. “Trump’s personality was his biggest problem and from a personality point of view, Joe was the opposite of Trump.”
McConnell saw the dynamic as a Republican tragedy. They had passed tax reform. Pedal to the metal on filling federal judgeships with conservatives. The economy was humming before the pandemic took hold in March. None of it was an accident. Trump’s hand was in all of it.
“We had a hell of a good four years,” McConnell said.
But it was now all personality. All Trump.
Biden, who had never won more than 1 percent of the vote in his two previous presidential outings, had luck and a perfect matchup.
“I’m not saying it was all just good luck, but he did have good luck,” McConnell said.
As for Trump, McConnell did not want a public war with the president. But he did not hold out any hope that Trump could change.
For nearly four years, McConnell had had what he called a “brotherhood” with cabinet officials like former secretary of defense James Mattis and former White House chief of staff John Kelly, and now with Attorney General William Barr. They tried to push Trump toward normal.
It was routinely a losing exercise. Futile. And by this final lap, the so-called brotherhood had seen many of its members exit the stage.
Inside the Republican cloakroom, one joke McConnell enjoyed telling was about Trump’s former secretary of state Rex Tillerson, a cabinet member he had liked.
In 2017, the State Department had strongly denied Tillerson called Trump a “moron.”
“Do you know why Tillerson was able to say he didn’t call the president a ‘moron’?” McConnell would dryly ask colleagues in his Kentucky drawl.
“Because he called him a ‘fucking moron.’ ”