Rage by Bob Woodard

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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Tue Sep 15, 2020 9:51 pm

On March 13, Trump declared a national emergency, the sixth of his presidency. He also announced the launch of a Google-related website that could “determine whether a test is warranted and to facilitate testing at a nearby convenient location.” This would “cover the country in large part.” Shortly after, Google tweeted that the tool in one of its small subsidiaries was still in development and was only intended to cover the Bay Area.

For two days straight that weekend, every story on the front page of The Washington Post was Covid-related. Americans cleared store shelves of hand sanitizer and toilet paper. The White House began instituting temperature checks. New York City announced the closure of its schools.

Matt Pottinger moved out of his small office in the national security adviser’s West Wing suite to an office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. This would keep him and O’Brien separate, so one would be able to run the NSC if either got sick. Pottinger began wearing a mask and handed them out to the NSC staff working in the Situation Room. He couldn’t require the staff to wear masks, but he urged them to. He and O’Brien had been using hand sanitizer for weeks.
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Tue Sep 15, 2020 9:51 pm

Birx, Fauci and Kushner had privately been exchanging drafts of guidelines that would ask Americans to take “15 Days to Slow the Spread” of the coronavirus and effectively shut down the country. They’d sent them back and forth a few times, and Jared Kushner had looked at a draft and made some comments. Kushner’s team worked on it for almost 24 hours straight, wrote it up with Derek Lyons, the staff secretary, then sent it to Fauci.

When Kushner got involved, it seemed to Fauci that meant the president would know more detail. No doubt Kushner would explain everything to him. That’s good, Fauci thought, because that gave them a direct line to the president.

When Senator Lindsey Graham first heard early discussion about shutting down the country, he thought it was crazy. Then he saw projections of possible 2.2 million dead.

“I’m no expert here,” Graham told Trump, “but if these projections are anywhere near right and you ignore them, you’re going to have a unique place in history. Mr. President, if these things are remotely right and you don’t act, it would be devastating to your presidency.”
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Tue Sep 15, 2020 9:53 pm

Trump gathered his team in the Oval Office that Sunday, March 15. Pence, Mnuchin, Fauci and Birx crowded around the Resolute Desk.

Fauci and Birx unrolled the guidelines to Trump. Physical separation is the key, they said. We should close down for at least 15 days to see what happens. They wanted to ask all Americans to work and attend school from home; to avoid gatherings of more than 10 people; to stay away from restaurants and bars; and to avoid traveling, shopping and visiting loved ones at nursing homes. They would recite the now familiar public health litany: wash your hands, don’t touch your face, sneeze into a tissue, and disinfect surfaces.

The final draft shows the weakness of having too many hands on the drafting process. Nowhere do the guidelines urge social distancing—staying six feet away from others—one of the most effective universal mitigations.

If we can follow the guidelines for 15 days, they said, and close everything down, perhaps we can start to “flatten the curve”—in other words, to spread out the number of infections over time to avoid overwhelming the health care system all at once.

As Trump listened, Fauci and Birx went back and forth with a skeptical Mnuchin.

I’m concerned about what’s going to happen economically, Mnuchin said.

Well, you know, Trump finally said, let’s try it for 15 days. Maybe we’ll be able to open up for Easter.

I don’t think we should guarantee that, Fauci said. We won’t be able to see the effect yet after 15 days.

Okay, let’s give it a shot, Trump said.

I’m worried, Mnuchin said. But he didn’t fight the decision.

That day at the briefing, Trump said, “This is a very contagious virus. It’s incredible. But it’s something that we have tremendous control over.”

That same day, Kushner got another grim wake-up call. He was working on ramping up more testing sites and went to a briefing at the Health and Human Services offices. We’ve got bad news, he was told. There are only 1.2 million swabs available for administering tests in the country.

It was a brutal realization. After being involved for four days, the scope of the problem was becoming clear. What good were tests if you didn’t have the swabs to administer them?
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Wed Sep 16, 2020 9:11 am

Trump announced the “15 Days to Slow the Spread” guidelines the next day, March 16, at the coronavirus task force briefing. Asked about his frequent assertion that the situation was under control, Trump acknowledged, “The virus, no, that’s not under control for anyplace in the world.” He added, “I was talking about what we’re doing is under control, but I’m not talking about the virus.”

Kushner told others the guidelines were “very thoughtful, very well-received and acclaimed by D’s and R’s.”

Graham believed Trump’s decision to shut down for 15 days was probably the first time in Trump’s life when he had to make a decision that was not in his best interest politically or financially. Graham was convinced Trump did it because he believed he had the power to save people’s lives. He had chosen the road that would be the most detrimental to his number-one issue—the economy.
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Wed Sep 16, 2020 9:12 am

For Redfield it was one of the most difficult times of his four-decade professional life. “15 Days to Slow the Spread” was important, but not enough.

In private he told others of his deepest fears. “It’s not to stop the spread,” Redfield said. “We were now in a race. I think we all understood now we were in a race. We’re in a marathon. We’re in a two-year, three-year race. Not a one-year, not a six-month race. The race is to slow and contain this virus as much as humanly possible, with all our efforts, till we can get a highly efficacious vaccine deployed for all the American people and then beyond that to the rest of the world.”

All the talk about the virus going away or disappearing was medically false.

In his agony, he recalled a parallel situation. Years ago when he had opened the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine they brought in a group of scientists from around the world. One from Princeton posed a question: Suppose we knew that 15 years out a meteor was hurtling to the earth and going to run smack-dab in the middle and destroy the planet and blow everyone to bits. The question was how do you change that? How do we change the center of gravity, presumably of the meteor or even earth? The current race again the virus was the same.

His worry could not be deeper. “This virus will stop when it basically infects more than 70 percent of the world, or 80 percent of the world,” Redfield told others. “Or the world develops a biological countermeasure that stops it,” he added, referring to a vaccine. The meteor was heading to earth.

As states, cities, businesses and individuals began to implement the guidelines, the country effectively began to shut down.

In a tweet on March 16, Trump wrote, “The United States will be powerfully supporting those industries, like Airlines and others, that are particularly affected by the Chinese Virus. We will be stronger than ever before!” This appears to be the first time Trump publicly referred to Covid as the “Chinese virus.”
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Wed Sep 16, 2020 9:25 am

Three days after Trump announced “15 Days to Slow the Spread,” I conducted my eighth interview with him.

“This thing is a nasty—it’s a nasty situation,” Trump told me about the coronavirus on March 19, 2020.

Earlier that day, California governor Gavin Newsom had become the first governor to order residents to stay home except for essential needs—the first of a wave of shutdown orders across all 50 states that would eventually lead to tens of millions of unemployment claims and the nation’s greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression.

The nation’s death toll from coronavirus was still less than 200.

In our interview, the president spoke with pride about his leadership. He blamed China and President Obama and continued to accept no responsibility.

“I think we’re doing very well,” the president said. “We have to see what happens. We have it very well shut down. The American people are terrific. You know, what they’re putting up with.”

In the course of the 40-minute phone call, Trump at three separate points brought up the story of his January 31 decision to bar foreigners coming from China to enter the United States. The decision had averted “tremendous death,” he said.

“Had I not done that, there would’ve been massive numbers of deaths by now,” Trump said. “It was a big move. Because you know, we take in thousands of people a day from China. And China was heavily infected.”

According to Trump, he made the decision in the face of great resistance from within and outside his administration.

I asked about his 13-year-old son, Barron. What did you tell him? I asked. The president told me about a moment days earlier when Barron had asked him about the coronavirus.

“He said Dad, what’s going on? What’s going on?” Trump told me. “I said, it’s a very bad thing, but we’re going to straighten it out.

“He said, how did it happen?” Trump continued. “I said, it came out of China, Barron, pure and simple. It came out of China. It should’ve been stopped. And to be honest with you, Barron, they should’ve let it be known it was a problem two months earlier. And the world would not—we have 141 countries have it now. And I said, the world wouldn’t have a problem. We could’ve stopped it easily. And they didn’t want to do the—they waited and waited. Kept it secret, secret. Then we started hearing things coming out. I told him how it was working. And I said, and now the whole world is infected and inflicted with this.”

It was apparent the president was aware of the criticism he was receiving about his handling of the coronavirus. After surviving the 22-month-long Mueller investigation and the third impeachment trial in United States history, the real dynamite behind the door was the virus. The lives and livelihoods of tens of millions of Americans hung in the balance with every decision he made in dealing with the coronavirus.

In our interview, he seemed to understand the deadly severity of the disease.

“Part of it is the mystery,” Trump said. “Part of it’s the viciousness. You know when it attacks, it attacks the lungs. And I don’t know—when people get hit, when they get hit, and now it’s turning out it’s not just old people, Bob. Just today and yesterday, some startling facts came out. It’s not just old, older. Young people too, plenty of young people.”

I asked Trump what had caused the shift in his thinking about the virus. “It’s clear just from what’s on the public record that you went through a pivot on this,” I said, “to, oh my God, the gravity is almost inexplicable and unexplainable.”

Just two days before, at the task force briefing, Trump had gone so far as to claim, “I’ve always known this is a—this is a real—this is a pandemic. I’ve felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”

The president maintained his upbeat rhetoric in the early weeks of the virus had been deliberate.

“I wanted to always play it down,” Trump told me, as I reported earlier in this book. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”

Trump said that the daily press briefings with members of his White House Coronavirus Task Force, led by Vice President Pence, were helping turn the tide of public opinion and making the public see his response in a more positive light.

“You know the news conferences I’ve been doing on a daily basis, because I think it keeps people informed and it’s been good, they’ve gotten very good reviews but they’ve also gotten unbelievable ratings,” he said.

The rambling, repetitious, often defensive and angry monologues eroded confidence in his grasp of the problem and his leadership. I asked Trump what his next steps were.

“My next step is I’ve got 20 calls waiting for me on this stuff, and I’ve got to get making them. Okay? That’s my next steps. My next step, Bob, is I have to do a great job,” Trump replied. “And I have to be very professional… I think that people are respecting what’s happening. And I think frankly since I started doing the news conferences, it’s all turned around.”

He had spoken at over 10 White House Coronavirus Task Force briefings and had begun holding them daily.

“Because we’ve done a great job. You’ve got to always say one of the best parts of the great job was the shutdown of China very, very early.”

Earlier in the day, Trump had given an 80-minute press briefing in which he promoted the use of the drug hydroxychloroquine as an alleged treatment for the virus. “If things don’t go as planned,” he said, “it’s not going to kill anybody.”

Studies later indicated the drug could cause serious heart problems, and the FDA in June cautioned against its use as a Covid-19 treatment due to risk of heart rhythm problems and trials that found “no benefit for decreasing the likelihood of death.”

Trump used the press briefing to praise the work of administration officials, including himself. He said Food and Drug Administration commissioner Stephen Hahn had “worked like, probably as hard or harder than anybody in this—in the group, other than maybe Mike Pence or me.”

When he spoke to me that evening, he remained fixated on the media’s coverage of his leadership during the pandemic.

“I had no symptoms, but the press was my symptom,” he said, referring to questions about whether he’d been tested for the virus.

I asked Trump about Dr. Fauci, who had become omnipresent in the lives of Americans through his media appearances since the outbreak of the virus.

“This is a war,” I said. “And in many ways, he’s your Eisenhower.” Under President Franklin Roosevelt, Eisenhower had been Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces and planned the invasion of Normandy which led to victory in World War II.

“Well, he’s a very good guy. He’s done it before,” Trump said of Fauci. “He’s a sharp guy.”

I began to ask Trump if he ever sat down alone with Fauci to get a tutorial on the science behind the virus when the president cut in.

“Yes, I guess, but honestly there’s not a lot of time for that, Bob. This is a busy White House. We’ve got a lot of things happening. And then this came up.”

No matter how busy or what other things were happening, I frankly wondered what could be more important. Trump had carved out hours to talk with me.

“Look, we had the greatest economy on earth. The greatest economy we’ve ever had,” Trump added, overstating the strength of the U.S. economy compared to other periods in the nation’s history. It reminded me of Kushner’s notion that “controversy elevates message.”

“And in one day, this thing came in and we had a choice to make,” Trump continued. “Close everything up and save potentially millions of lives—you know, hundreds of thousands of lives—or don’t do anything and look at body bags every day being taken out of apartment buildings.”

“Who told you that?” I asked.

“It was me,” Trump said. “I told me that.”

As he led the nation through the crisis, Trump showed few signs of introspection.

“Was there a moment in all of this, last two months, where you said to yourself—you know, you’re waking up or whatever you’re doing and you say, ah, this is the leadership test of a lifetime?” I asked.

“No,” he answered.

“No?”

“I think it might be, but I don’t think that. All I want to do is get it solved.”

I brought up Trump’s comments at a press briefing the previous week, when he had said “I don’t take responsibility at all” for the crisis.

“I don’t take responsibility for this,” Trump told me. “I have nothing to do with this. I take responsibility for solving the problem. But I don’t take responsibility for this, no. We did a good job. The Obama administration—they were obsolete tests. And in all fairness to them, nobody ever thought in terms of millions of people.”

I could find no support for Trump’s claim, repeated several times in public remarks, that the Obama administration left behind “obsolete” or “broken” tests. Obama’s National Security Council had left behind a 69-page document titled “Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents” that included instructions for dealing with novel influenza viruses which “would produce an estimate of between 700,000 and 1.4 billion fatalities from a pandemic of a virulent influenza virus strain.” The document recommended officials in the early stages of such a pandemic check the nation’s diagnostic testing capacity and the amount of personal protective equipment available for health care workers.

Complaints about a lack of preparation were universal. For two years Redfield had testified before Congress that the country was not prepared for a large health crisis. When a 2018 report on the Zika virus, West Nile virus and other diseases caused by insect bites was released, Redfield said, “We don’t know what will threaten Americans next.”

Shortly before midnight on March 22, Trump tweeted in all-caps, “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF. AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO!”
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Wed Sep 16, 2020 9:29 am

In late March, Kushner and Pence had a meeting with the data people at FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. They gave Kushner a list showing the country would need 130,000 ventilators by April 1. The message sank in. It meant possibly 130,000 people were going to die because he didn’t get them a ventilator. It meant the situation soon could mirror that in Italy, where doctors were choosing who lived and who died. In Kushner’s view people dying on hospital gurneys because they couldn’t get ventilators was not politically survivable.

Pence saw Kushner was disturbed. “Come for a ride back,” he said. So Kushner and Pence rode back to the White House together. “Jared,” Pence said, “we’ll figure it out.”

Kushner broke the news about the ventilators to Trump, who later called it the scariest day of his life and said he told the team to “move heaven and earth” to get the ventilators.

Kushner gathered White House economists and data modelers he knew from the private sector in the Roosevelt Room. They pulled Medicare and Medicaid data and went hospital by hospital, getting the highest number of ventilators the hospital had ever billed for at one time, then aggregated the numbers on a state-by-state basis. Before FEMA sent out more ventilators, Kushner said, it would need to ask how many ventilators were in the state, how many anesthesia machines had the state converted to ventilators, and what was the state’s daily utilization rate?

Kushner’s team predeployed ventilators so that every time they got to about 96 hours away from running out, they sent them another 500. New York and New Jersey came close a few times on ventilators.

New York governor Andrew Cuomo was holding daily press conferences that were getting high marks, and he loudly complained about the lack of ventilators, at one point saying New York needed 40,000 more ventilators.

Trump called Kushner. Jared, why aren’t you sending out more ventilators?

Cuomo was wrong, Kushner said. He and his team had checked by calling the New York hospitals. No one in New York was 96 hours away from needing a ventilator, Kushner said.
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Wed Sep 16, 2020 9:31 am

On March 26, a reporter asked Trump about the language he used to describe the virus. “I talk about the Chinese virus and—and I mean it. That’s where it came from,” he said. “And this was a Chinese virus.”

Later that day, Trump and Xi spoke again by phone about the virus. At the start of the call, Trump discussed comments by the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman that the virus had been brought to China by an American soldier. This is a ridiculous comment, you know, Trump said. It was tense, and they argued.

Xi pivoted to a different topic. French president Emmanuel Macron wanted to hold a meeting of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council. The leaders discussed the potential meeting before the conversation moved back to the virus.

Xi said China was on the other side of its peak, and new case numbers had dropped significantly. He claimed any new cases in China were imported. Trump and Pottinger, who was listening on the call, knew this was not true at all.

Xi called the virus the common enemy and said his health minister would contact Azar, his American counterpart, to share best practices.

Trump asked Xi what was effective in fighting against the virus. What medicines and therapeutics were working for China?

Lockdowns, quarantine and social distancing were effective, Xi replied. He claimed the lockdown in Wuhan had prevented the spread of the virus to the rest of the world. Early discovery, early testing, early quarantine and early treatment were helpful, he said.

It would help, Xi added, if U.S. officials—many of whom had borrowed the “Chinese virus” phrase from Trump—adjusted their comments. He expressed concern about anti-Chinese sentiment.

Trump said that he personally and the American people loved the Chinese people and would never tolerate mistreatment of people visiting from China.

The two leaders spent the remainder of the call discussing the virus and treatments for it.

Why is the fatality rate so high in Wuhan? Trump asked.

Xi replied that it was because of the proportion of elderly people in Wuhan, and the high concentration of cases.

The call ended cordially, with Xi inviting the president and first lady to visit once the virus had passed and Trump again thanking him for the offer.

Although Xi did not make any direct threat, Pottinger thought he had suggested a cause-and-effect relationship between the tone of U.S. official statements and the degree of cooperation China would provide. He also thought it was outrageous—and part of the cover-up—that China had not provided virus samples as required by international agreement.

During the next day’s briefing, Trump alluded to his call with Xi and said, “You can call it a germ, you can call it a flu, you can call it a virus. You know, you can call it many different names. I’m not sure anybody even knows what it is.”
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Wed Sep 16, 2020 9:32 am

“I’m running a big, big operation,” the president said when I reached him again by phone on Saturday morning, March 28.

The country had surpassed 2,000 deaths and officially had more reported cases than any other country. The day before, Trump had signed a $2 trillion pandemic response bill.

“The world is under siege, as you know,” he said. “I think we’re doing a good job. It’s unbelievable, though.” He sounded beleaguered. “What’s your feeling?”

“The leadership task that’s on your shoulders,” I began.

“Yeah.”

“People are going to be looking at this and trying to understand it a hundred years from now,” I said. My question for that history was, “What are your priorities?”

“There’s a lot of really fake news out,” he answered, retreating to his first talking point. He complained for a time about the media.

“The question though is what—because it’s on your shoulders,” I tried again. “What are your priorities?”

“My priorities are saving lives,” he said. “That’s my only priority.”

I reminded him he’d said that he discussed how this began with President Xi. “Did he have an answer?”

“Right,” Trump said. “Well, I did, and I discussed it. And then I said, look, it’s no longer relevant right now. We’ll talk about it after it’s all over. Because in the meantime we have to fix what’s here. But there’s no reason to get into a big argument about that now. Sometimes you just sort of say, okay, let’s talk about that sometime later. They’re very defensive, as they probably—as you would be.”

“When we talked in February, you said there’s dynamite behind every door,” I said. “And this is before all of this accelerated. And I wonder if at that point did you have any inkling or intelligence that my God, we’ve got this storm coming?”

“Well nobody knew that a thing like this could happen,” Trump said. “The best decision I made was Europe and China, closing our doors. We would’ve had a much bigger problem, like many times bigger than we had. We would’ve had unbelievable amounts of death.”

“Fauci is predicting we may have 100,000 deaths in this country,” I said.

“It could happen,” he said. “And if we didn’t do what I’m doing, you would’ve had a number many times that. Can you believe that?”

“How’s Xi’s mood?” I asked. “Because they’ve been clobbered also.”

“They’ve been clobbered far worse than you read,” the president said.

“I understand that it shows in North Korea they’re being clobbered also.” North Korea had publicly claimed it didn’t have a single case of the virus.

“Like you wouldn’t believe,” Trump said. “We haven’t had a war,” he reminded me. “Okay? And then you have something like this. And this stops wars, because they’ve got their own war now.”

“Somebody told me that the virus is just blazing through North Korea,” I said.

“Yeah. A big problem. Iran is an unbelievable problem.”

China had blamed American soldiers for bringing in the virus. Trump said he told President Xi, “Look, you can’t do that. And you know, we had a little bit of an argument.”

I understood that Trump’s decision to publicly call coronavirus the “Chinese virus” had led some White House staffers to feel emboldened to criticize China even harder. Trump was worried because he knew words could cause wars. He had told them, “You can’t do that shit,” and stopped them fast.

The scale of the problem had clearly sunk in. Trump almost sounded like a different person.
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Wed Sep 16, 2020 9:33 am

auci and Birx returned a few days later, right at the end of the 15 days. They needed to extend the time of the shutdown and advocated for another 30 days to “slow the spread.”

“Mr. President, that’s a nonstarter,” Fauci said of reopening the country for Easter. “You can’t do that.” After 15 days, they couldn’t know if they’d had any impact. It was premature. “We’ve got to go to 30 more days.”

Trump turned to Fauci and Birx. You guys feel really strongly about this?

Mr. President, they said, we really do need to do it. Because we may start to see a flattening of the curve, and then you’ll come back and say, you know, it was a really good thing for us to do this.

Okay, we’ll go with it, Trump said. I hope you guys are right.

Okay, Fauci said. I think we are.
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Wed Sep 16, 2020 9:47 am

Trump announced the 30-day extension on March 29. Fauci said modeling showed the U.S. could be in excess of a million cases and deaths could exceed 100,000 without mitigation efforts. “I mean, you could make a big sound bite about it, but the fact is it’s possible,” Fauci said. “What we’re trying to do is not let that happen.”

Trump added, “If we can hold that down, as we’re saying, to 100,000—that’s a horrible number—and maybe even less, but to 100,000, so we have between 100- and 200,000—we all, together, have done a very good job.”

At the next day’s briefing, Trump said, “Stay calm. It will go away. You know it—you know it is going away, and it will go away. And we’re going to have a great victory.”
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Wed Sep 16, 2020 9:53 am

April began with dire headlines about the latest White House task force models, released March 31, predicting 100,000 to 240,000 deaths nationwide even with mitigation measures like social distancing, and 1.5 million to 2.2 million without mitigation.

Trump seemed to be on a war against rules. On April 3, when the CDC issued new guidance recommending that Americans wear masks, Trump said at the Coronavirus Task Force briefing that day, “This is voluntary. I don’t think I’m going to be doing it.”

The death toll in the United States had reached 7,000 and the number of new cases was rising by a staggering 30,000 each day.

“I’m feeling good,” Trump added later in the briefing. “I just don’t want to be doing—I don’t know, somehow sitting in the Oval Office behind that beautiful Resolute Desk—the great Resolute Desk—I think wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens, I don’t know. Somehow, I don’t see it for myself.”

Away from the cameras, however, the president’s mood was grim.
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Wed Sep 16, 2020 9:56 am

“The plague,” President Trump said when I reached him by phone late in the afternoon of April 5, 2020, Palm Sunday.

The president had given up on his plan to open the country by Easter. He sounded resigned, almost chastened, with a solemn tone unlike any I had heard in our previous nine interviews.

“It’s a horrible thing. It’s unbelievable. Can you believe it? It moves rapidly and viciously. If you’re the wrong person and if it gets you, your life is pretty much over if you’re in the wrong group. It’s our age group.”

He was 73, and I had recently turned 77.

I had prepared a list of 14 critical areas where my sources said major action was needed. My goal was to cover all 14 in our interview and find out what Trump thought and might have planned. Given the risks and hazards, I believed this could not be a standard interview. I wanted to lay it out as starkly and candidly as I could. Was he organized? Was there a plan?

“Are we going to go to full mobilization?” I asked. “People I talk to say they want that feeling of full mobilization. No one is going to say Trump did too much. There’s never too much.”

“I agree,” he said.

Testing was the first of the 14 areas I wanted to cover. My reporting showed that Dr. Anthony Fauci, in private briefings, had been saying of the federal government’s response to the coronavirus that “we aren’t there yet.” Officials were saying we need a “Manhattan-like project,” something reminiscent of the scale and scope of the 1940s project to successfully develop an atomic bomb.

Trump has a habit of ignoring questions and attempting to redirect the conversation. At times, talking with him meant being talked at. Now Trump veered off, citing the 3,000-bed facility the U.S. military had built in the Javits Center in New York City. “That was for regular surgeries, etc. That was for regular patients, not Covid patients,” he said. “I don’t know if you know that. Do you know that?”

“Yeah. Certainly. The question is—”

“But you know that’s a big deal, Bob. I mean, that’s a big deal.” They were trying to make sure there was enough room in the hospitals for coronavirus patients.

Given the magnitude of the crisis, the Javits Center was important but did not address the national crisis. I pushed again on testing. All the health professionals said testing was key because people, particularly those without symptoms, could be isolated to prevent infecting others. Tens of millions of tests would be required, if not hundreds of millions.

“The question is, are you happy?” I asked about the scope of the federal government’s response. On testing, “Is it enough?”

He did not answer. The Democratic governors, he said, would not give him enough credit in public.

“Is this full mobilization?” I pressed. “A Manhattan Project? Are we going—pardon the expression—balls to the wall? That’s what people want. And people want to feel that.”

He said he’d been “speaking to people all day” and indicated he was trying to get that message out through his daily news conferences. “Maybe then I’m doing a bad job of, not saying it.”

That was an almost unheard-of concession, but he immediately began talking about New York governor Andrew Cuomo. “Hey look,” the president said. “Cuomo asked us for 40,000 ventilators. Okay? Think of it.” The most severely ill patients needed the ventilator machines to help them breathe.

“Okay,” I said, “but Cuomo is not the issue.”

“No, no, I know. But 40,000. I told him, you don’t need anywhere near that amount. Now it’s turning out that we’re right.” Trump was correct. When the White House individually polled the New York hospitals, far fewer were needed.

The responsibility was his, I said. “You are the one. This is a question about your leadership. And you know, I just want to know how you feel about it.”

“I feel good,” he said. “I think we’re doing a great job.” He launched into a familiar grievance. “I think we’ll never get credit from the fake news media no matter how good a job we do. No matter how good a job I do, I will never get credit from the media, and I’ll never get credit from Democrats who want to beat me desperately in seven months.”

“If you go out and say this is full mobilization—” I said.

“I’ve done it. I have done it. Well look—” he said.

“Manhattan Project—”

“Well, yeah,” he said.

We were speaking past each other, almost from different universes.

I turned to the second large issue on my list, the struggle to supply personal protective equipment to hospital
employees and other workers. “The medical supply chain. People I talk to say they still aren’t satisfied with it.”

The president let out a loud sigh that can be heard on the recording.
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Wed Sep 16, 2020 9:57 am

“We’re getting very few complaints,” he said. “Now, I am a big fan of the hydroxychloroquine.” The antimalarial drug was touted by some, including Trump, as a game-changing cure for Covid-19. “It may not work, by the way, and it may work. If it does work, I will get no credit for it, and if it doesn’t work, they’ll blame the hell out of me. Okay? But that’s okay. I don’t mind that. But we are—we have millions of—we’ve ordered millions of doses of the hydroxy. We’ve ordered millions—we have millions—we’re stocked.”

Later, on May 18, Trump would reveal he had been taking the drug.

“The third area, sir, is the unemployment benefits and the cash payments.” Was there really a system in place that would work? Nearly 10 million had applied for unemployment benefits—a stunning number. Congress had passed a $2 trillion stimulus package in late March that provided those on unemployment an extra $600 per week.

“I was totally opposed to the distribution of the money the way the Democrats wanted it,” the president said. “They wanted it to go through unemployment insurance—you know, centers. But many of them have 40-year-old computers. I said, it’ll take a long time to get there if you do that. And we have already—the money is sent. It’s up to the states to deliver it.”

“Okay,” I said. “The fourth area is the small business loans” being given out through the Paycheck Protection Program.

“That’s going really well, Bob. I mean, that—I don’t know if you saw. It was opened on Friday.”

“I understand. But some of the banks are not participating because they say that—”

“Well, if they don’t participate we’re not going to be happy with them. But Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, they had to get straightened out. It had nothing to do with us.” He had a strong point that $13 billion had been loaned in the first day, though the total allocated in the stimulus and rescue package was $350 billion and would have to be increased.

“Fifth area,” I said. “Shelter in place.”

“It’s been very successful,” he said.

“Does it need a national order? I know you’re reluctant to do this.”

The effort to get people to stay at home was going well, he correctly noted. “There are a lot of constitutional reasons, there are a lot of federalist reasons” not to issue a national order.

“Sixth is the food supply,” I said. “Are you confident that the food supply is going to get out to people?”

“Yeah,” he said. “You haven’t even heard a complaint about that, Bob. I mean, it’s going great. I had a big meeting with all the big suppliers on Thursday. The biggest in the world, all of them. We also had meetings with all the big department store types and all of them—from Amazon to Walmart to all of them. And they’re all doing well. And they also, they have long lines going to stores because we’re keeping them six feet away in the line.” A month later, spiking infection rates in meatpacking plants would jeopardize the nation’s meat supply.

“Seventh area, international coordination.” I asked Trump if he had seen Henry Kissinger’s recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal headlined, “The Coronavirus Pandemic Will Forever Alter the World Order.”

“I did not, no. What did he say?”

Kissinger had stressed the international nature of the crisis. “Failure,” he’d written, “could set the world on fire.”

“Do you have somebody who will be the focal point of coordinating with all the other countries involved in this?” I asked.

“And he’s focused on this?” I asked.

“Oh yeah. He’s very focused on it. We have more than him. We have, the entire State Department is focused on it. But honestly Bob, it’s more of a local problem from that standpoint.”

It was not at all clear what he meant by “a local problem,” but before I could ask he cited his invocation of the Defense Production Act to get 3M to agree to ship 166.5 million N95 masks from China over three months, which Kushner had successfully pushed. Trump had faced criticism for being slow to use the DPA to force domestic manufacturers to focus on U.S. government needs, and the country was still well short of the 500 to 600 million face masks sought by the administration.

“Okay,” I said. “How about the next area? What’s the definition of an essential worker? People feel it’s—everyone’s defining it the way they want to define it. Do you have a definition or does the federal government—”

“We had a specific definition,” he said. “I can give it to you if you want. But we do have a very specific definition.” The Department of Homeland Security had released a 19-page advisory memo with suggested ways to identify essential workers in March, but individual states and counties differed in their definitions.

“Well, it seems loose and vague to people.”

“Okay, well, I’ll put it out. Maybe I’ll talk about that today.” He did not bring the subject up in his press briefing that night. “You know, we had a case where the churches are saying it’s essential. It’s a very interesting question. The churches are saying they’re essential.”

Some states had classified churches among the essential businesses in order to allow them the option to stay open and conduct services.

“How about air travel?” I asked. “Some people say you’re just sending planes with four people on it from one city to the next and that is jeopardizing people. Is there a national policy?”

“They’re mostly closed down. We have to keep some flights open for emergency purposes, but they’re mostly closed down. The airlines are doing checks. We’re doing checks. But they’re mostly closed down, Bob. But they do have some routes. If you do what some people—you need to have at least a semblance of, a little bit—now, we check people going on, getting off. And it has not been a problem.”

In March 2020 U.S. airlines carried 36.6 million passengers on scheduled flights, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, about half of the 77.5 million passengers in March 2019.

In a press briefing on April 1, Trump had said he was considering taking action to regulate flights. “You have them going, in some cases, from hot spot to hot spot,” he said. But ultimately, no federal government action was taken to limit domestic air travel.

“Do Fauci and Dr. Birx, do they say this is enough?” I asked if they considered air travel “leakage.”

“Well, they haven’t complained,” Trump said. “I mean, you know—maybe I’ll ask them that question, but they have not complained either.”

“Okay,” I said. I tried again to ask the basic unanswered question: Who is in charge of key areas? “Now who’s in charge of the effort—I’ve talked to some people”—again the president let out a deep sigh—“who are doing very aggressive, imaginative work on vaccines and antibodies. Who’s in charge of that?”

“NIH,” he said. “National Institute, which is phenomenal. And they are doing it. They’re in charge of it. We have a lot of potential vaccines, especially probably Johnson & Johnson. You know, NIH is doing the work but we also farm it out to many, many companies.”

He was correct about Vaccine Development Services at NIH, but there was no one person clearly and publicly leading this vital government effort.
“I do. I do. We have a secretary of state named Mike Pompeo.”
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Wed Sep 16, 2020 9:59 am

“Have you talked to Bill Gates at all?” I asked. Gates, the cofounder of Microsoft and more recently one of the world’s leading experts on managing mammoth public health crises, had with his wife, Melinda, invested billions of dollars through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation into global development and public health initiatives. Gates had been warning about a pandemic for years. In a recent Washington Post op-ed, he’d written that the only way out of the crisis would be a vaccine.

“No, I have not. He—But I think I’m going to be meeting him very shortly, yeah.”

The two had met several times before. In December 2016, Gates came to Trump Tower to warn the president-elect about the risks of a pandemic and encouraged him to prioritize preparing for one. In 2017, Trump told Gates he was thinking about establishing a commission to examine the “bad effects” of vaccines. “No, that’s a dead end, that would be a bad thing, don’t do that,” Gates had told Trump.

“He’s the expert,” I said. “He spent billions of dollars of his own money. He says we only get out of this when we have vaccines.”

Trump later announced that he was going to discontinue funding for the World Health Organization because he felt the organization had protected China during the crisis. In a tweet on April 15, Gates blasted the decision, writing, “Halting funding for the World Health Organization during a world health crisis is as dangerous as it sounds.… The world needs WHO now more than ever.” After the tweet, Gates and the president never met, according to a Gates senior aide.

“Well, we’re doing great on vaccines,” Trump said. “The problem with a vaccine is a vaccine will take 13 to 14 months once you have it. Because you have to test a vaccine. As opposed to the hydroxy, you have to test it. Because the hydroxy’s been out there for 25 years.” Hydroxychloroquine had long been available as a treatment for malaria and arthritis, but it was still being studied as a theoretical treatment for Covid-19 when we spoke.

“Next area is China on the wet markets. Some people—I think Fauci is saying privately in briefings we’ve got to get China to close down their wet markets” where the virus originated in Wuhan.

“Yeah, some people are saying that,” Trump acknowledged. “And that one I have not done yet. You have to understand, I just signed a massive trade deal turning everything—because China’s been ripping us off for years. Like ripping us like you’ve never seen, economically.” He did not want to jeopardize the China trade deal.

“No, I—listen, Mr. President, I understand all of that. The question is, you’ve got some experts like Fauci—”

“Well, I don’t know,” Trump said. “Fauci also said that this wouldn’t be a problem, so—this disease was not going to be a problem. I was in the room when he said it, okay? So you know—”

In public, Fauci did play down the severity of the virus in late February.

Trump continued, “And some of the people that you mentioned. And you know, they turned out to be wrong on that. So you know, they can be wrong too, Bob. Right?”

“Absolutely. I think—I’m telling you as a reporter, I’ll emphasize this again. They’re saying they want a sense of World War II mobilization.”

“All right, I got you. I understand. I got you. I think we’re doing a very good job, but I’ve got exactly what you’re saying. Now in New York the deaths have fallen for the first time. That’s a big step.” The day before, New York State had reported 630 coronavirus deaths. That morning it had reported 594.

“How about the small-government Republicans who, you know, are real leery of all this spending of trillions of dollars?” I asked. “Are they obstacles?”

“If I listened to them, I wouldn’t have closed the country.”

“Okay. How about the intelligence agencies? How’s CIA director Gina Haspel doing?” I asked, trying to ascertain the role intelligence was playing in the fight against the virus. “And do you feel that you know what’s going on in the world?”

“Better than any president’s known in 30 years,” he said, only answering the last part of the question. But he added, “I’m listening to every word you’re saying.”

My reporting, I repeated, showed that people wanted “full mobilization, we’re at Manhattan Project level here and we’re not going to stop—and I’m reporting to you what people are saying—”

“No matter what I do,” he replied, “they’ll always tell you bad.”

“Even people who don’t like you,” I said, “people who are opposed to you—want this country to succeed on this.”

“Well, no,” he said. “I think there are some people that would rather have it not succeed. Okay? That’s a big statement. There are some people that would rather have it not succeed so that they could possibly beat me in the election. All right?

“I will tell you that with straightness. There are people on the radical fringes and the left that would rather have us not succeed.”

“God will never forgive them, then,” I said.

“Well, maybe that’s true,” Trump said. “I will never forgive them.”

He tried to steer the conversation back to the ventilator dispute his administration had resolved.

“But if you go to full mobilization—” I said.

“I am,” he said.

“—and you tell the world and the country that’s it, these are the people who are in charge of testing, of unemployment benefits, loans, the food supply, international coordination, air travel, the vaccines, China, the intelligence world—if you, if that’s clear to people—”

“Right,” Trump said.

“During the Nixon case,” I said, “Nixon did not understand the goodwill that people feel toward a president. Now, you—that is a problem now in this country, the polarization, no question. But—”

“Yeah, but the ones that like me, like me a lot, okay?” Trump said.

“But people know this is a survival issue,” I said. “People are talking about their kids, and they’re saying, what kind of world are we going to give to our kids?”

“They’re right. But when you talk about that—Nixon was an unpopular guy. I have great support out there. You don’t see it, probably. All you have to do is take a look at the polls. I’m getting—I just got a 69 percent or 68 percent for the approval rating for this.”

A Gallup poll in March showed that 60 percent approved of his handling of the crisis while 38 percent did not. Presidents often get bumps in their approval ratings during times of national crisis.

“I’m asking you a series of questions,” I said, “based on my reporting.”

“Give me a list of the things you said. Did you write them down, or not?”

“Yes, I wrote them all down.”

“Just read them out. Go ahead, read them.”

I read back over the list, reemphasizing all the critical areas. Trump pushed me impatiently along, item by item.

I added a final point: “People really need a sustainable income stream”—or at least a reliable way to say, “okay, at some point I’m going to get this money—whether it’s unemployment benefits, cash payments, some sort of loan.”

When I reached the end of the list he said, “That’s good. I’m glad you told me. Many of these things are done or in great shape. But I’m glad you told me.”

He was blowing off both me and the list.

Elsa, my wife, was in the room during the call. At times I raised my voice in order to be able to complete a question or press the president to answer. At one point, she told me to stop yelling. She felt my list of 14 points sounded too much like I was telling him what to do. Others, I am sure, would agree. The list represented what I had found from my reporting, as I told him several times. If I was going to write about the list—and I was sure I would—I thought it only fair to ask him about it.

I hung up, feeling distressed. Trump never did seem willing to fully mobilize the federal government and continually seemed to push problems off on the states. There was no real management theory of the case or how to organize a massive enterprise to deal with one of the most complex emergencies the United States had ever faced. Beyond being a reporter, I was worried for the country.
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Wed Sep 16, 2020 10:00 am

That same evening, Lindsey Graham spoke with Trump in a phone conversation of about 25 minutes. Graham had talked repeatedly with the president during the crisis and worried that Trump didn’t want to own the coronavirus problem.

“He’s got one foot in and one foot out,” Graham said, describing the call afterward. “He wants to be a wartime president, but he doesn’t want to own any more than he has to own.”

Graham told Trump complaints from people about unemployment benefits were a state problem and not his fault, but said, “I think it’s your job to fix problems, even if it’s not your fault.”

The real flaw, Graham said, is testing. He had talked to Fauci. “Dr. Fauci said there’s 25 to 50 percent of the population with it that don’t even know they have it,” he said—referring to the percentage of infected people who don’t have symptoms but can spread the virus to others, not the overall U.S. population. “The only way you’re ever going to find out is to test. If you don’t, you’ll reignite the virus.”

Graham said he told the president, “You need a plan. You need to explain to the country, we’re not helpless against the virus. Here’s the game plan to beat the virus.

“You need theater commanders like you’ve got in Iraq or in Afghanistan. Somebody in charge of testing. Somebody in charge of vaccines. You need a Petraeus to regain your footing. You’ve lost the momentum. You need a surge. Testing is the biggest flaw we have.”

While Trump’s job approval rating had reached the highest level of his presidency the week of this interview—about 47 percent in an average of national polls—it was beginning a downward slide as the weeks of the crisis drew on. “You need to peak in October,” Graham told Trump. “You need to have the economy showing signs of life. A vaccine on the horizon. Drug therapies that work.”

Graham said Biden would be “a rough opponent, but your opponent’s the coronavirus.”

“That’s probably true,” Trump answered.

“It is, Mr. President. If you fuck it up, there’s nothing you can do to get reelected. If you seem to, you know, manage it well, you’re pretty much unbeatable. You keep the body count down, people will see you as somebody that was successful.”

As close as he was to the president, Graham felt it was hard to penetrate Trump World and find out who had influence with him. But Graham knew Trump’s nature. “His biggest political threat is for people to go without a paycheck for weeks and get disgruntled, and he overreacts and tries to open up the economy too soon. That will be the end of him, because you’ll have another round of the virus.”

People needed their paycheck, Graham was sure. “He’ll say, I’m tired of this, let’s open up the economy as the answer, instead of trying to fix the state unemployment systems. If they’re out of work for six weeks with no check, they’re going to hold him accountable.”
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Wed Sep 16, 2020 10:00 am

On April 6, the day after I spoke with Trump, the president began the day on a cheery note. “LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL!” he tweeted around 8:00 a.m. Later that day, American deaths rose to 10,746. One of Trump’s allies, U.K. prime minister Boris Johnson, came down with the virus and was moved into intensive care.

It was also becoming clear the virus was disproportionately affecting minority communities. Counties that are majority-Black “have three times the rate of infections and almost six times the rate of deaths as counties where white residents are the majority,” The Washington Post reported on April 7.

In the four-week period ending April 9, more than 17 million Americans had filed for unemployment, Labor Department figures showed.

On April 10, Trump predicted the U.S. death count would be lower than the minimum predicted by the task force’s models. “The minimum number was 100,000 lives, and I think we’ll be substantially under that number,” he said.
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Wed Sep 16, 2020 10:01 am

On April 11, the death toll from the coronavirus in the United States climbed above 20,000. The United States surpassed Italy as the country with the most coronavirus fatalities in the world.

On Sunday, April 12, Fauci was asked about a story that Trump had been too slow to act on the virus during an interview on CNN. “If you had a process that was ongoing and started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives,” Fauci said. He added: “If we had, right from the very beginning shut everything down, it may have been different. But there was a lot of pushback for shutting everything down back then.”

Several hours later, on Sunday evening, Trump retweeted a tweet that suggested Fauci should be fired, sparking widespread speculation and worry about Fauci’s fate. Trump later told me he had a good relationship with Fauci.

Monday afternoon, the president fought back against the criticism in a freewheeling, two-hour press briefing that began with a campaign-ad-style video touting his “decisive action” on the virus. Answering questions from reporters, Trump declined to acknowledge any mistakes and said his administration was “way ahead of schedule” in its response. When asked what he had done to prepare hospitals and ramp up testing with the extra time Trump said he bought by being ahead of schedule, the president called the reporter “disgraceful.” He alternated between blaming Democratic governors for failures and claiming he had total authority over the national response. “When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total,” Trump said. “And that’s the way it’s got to be. It’s total.”

The next day, Trump said decisions about when to reopen would be largely in the hands of the governors. The federal government would “be there to help,” he said, but “the governors are going to be opening up their states. They’re going to declare when.”
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by Kriegsspiel » Wed Sep 16, 2020 10:03 am

If Vinny keeps it up, this thread will be longer than the coronavirus thread in no time.
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Wed Sep 16, 2020 10:46 am

Kriegsspiel wrote:
Wed Sep 16, 2020 10:03 am
If Vinny keeps it up, this thread will be longer than the coronavirus thread in no time.
I've already been wisely counseled by Xan so there will be drastically less activity in this topic. Plus, I'm 72% through the book.

Vinny
Last edited by vnatale on Wed Sep 16, 2020 10:47 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Wed Sep 16, 2020 10:46 am

Trump had initially resisted criminal justice reform, known as the First Step Act, reforming prisons and sentencing passed by Congress and signed into law in 2018, but Kushner had pushed it hard and it passed with large bipartisan majorities. It was working politically so Trump now clung to it. Graham realized Trump rewrote the history on that and said he had always been for it.
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Wed Sep 16, 2020 10:49 am

“We need to be careful,” Fauci said, intentionally addressing not just Trump but the other task force members who were present. “This is not going to just disappear. It’s not going to go away by itself. It’s going to be up to us.” They had to continue to mitigate and find a vaccine.

“I know a guy who got sick,” the president responded, repeating an anecdote they had all heard before, changing the subject and overpowering the session.

“The president is on a separate channel,” Fauci later told others. Trump’s leadership was “rudderless.”

Another time Fauci made an appeal to others in the Oval Office after the president had strayed from the facts in the press briefing. “We can’t let the president be out there being vulnerable,” Fauci said, “saying something that’s going to come back and bite him.”

Pence, chief of staff Mark Meadows, Kushner and aide Stephen Miller tensed up at once. It was palpable to Fauci. It was as if they were saying you can’t be talking to the president that way. They were an unyielding fortress around the president.

Often when Fauci challenged Trump on something he had said, Trump would jump in and change the subject. Fauci marveled at Trump, who would hopscotch from one topic to another. “His attention span is like a minus number,” Fauci said privately.

Trump seemed interested in one outcome. “His sole purpose is to get reelected,” Fauci told an associate. Fauci was particularly disappointed in Kushner, who talked like a cheerleader as if everything was great.

Fauci tried to preserve the candor but with the gentle touch.

“Mr. President,” he said another time, “I really would be careful about saying it that way. They are going to come back and criticize you.”

“Who gives a shit?” Trump replied. “They criticize me no matter what I do anyway.” Trump never invited Fauci or the other medical professionals to brief him in detail or provide a tutorial. Nor did Fauci ever ask for extended time or time alone with the president.
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by Cortopassi » Wed Sep 16, 2020 12:42 pm

vnatale wrote:
Wed Sep 16, 2020 10:46 am
Kriegsspiel wrote:
Wed Sep 16, 2020 10:03 am
If Vinny keeps it up, this thread will be longer than the coronavirus thread in no time.
I've already been wisely counseled by Xan so there will be drastically less activity in this topic. Plus, I'm 72% through the book.

Vinny
You have a digital version of the book, right? You aren’t retyping all this in?
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by Xan » Wed Sep 16, 2020 12:48 pm

Actually I was suggesting that we might need to pare down what's already here, too... I don't think we can have this much of somebody's book posted on the forum.

And, it's too much to have a useful discussion. Maybe a thread about each of 5 major highlights? Or a thread about own summary of some theme described in the book?
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Wed Sep 16, 2020 5:14 pm

Cortopassi wrote:
Wed Sep 16, 2020 12:42 pm
vnatale wrote:
Wed Sep 16, 2020 10:46 am
Kriegsspiel wrote:
Wed Sep 16, 2020 10:03 am
If Vinny keeps it up, this thread will be longer than the coronavirus thread in no time.
I've already been wisely counseled by Xan so there will be drastically less activity in this topic. Plus, I'm 72% through the book.

Vinny
You have a digital version of the book, right? You aren’t retyping all this in?
Yes. Digital version.

First time I ever saw an article in an email discussion list on the internet I thought that someone was actually re-typing the entire article!

Vinny
Above provided by: Vinny, who always says: "I only regret that I have but one lap to give to my cats." AND "I'm a more-is-more person."
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