According to this piece by Gabriel Sherman in Vanity Fair, a grim projected death toll and a friend in a coma seem to have resulted in a change of heart. Hope Hicks, Trump's longtime confidant, also seems to be making a difference. My university, the University of Texas at Austin, announced today that summer classes are going to have to be remote, meaning no in-person classes which has been the situation since Spring break.
The short of it is that we must not only flatten the curve but also end the pandemic itself—which are two overlapping, yet separate goals. We can't do this alone as a country. Because viruses know no borders, the whole world must be engaged—and ideally, in a collaborative manner.
-Angela Valenzuela
“The Campaign Panicked”: Inside Trump’s Decision to Back Off of His Easter Coronavirus Miracle
An impulsive promise (“His view was: I need to show people there’s a light at the end of the tunnel”) led to Fauci pushback. Poll numbers—and a friend in a coma—pushed Trump to reverse course.
by Gabriel Sherman
April 1, 2020
The national debate set off by Donald Trump’s announcement that he wanted churches packed on Easter was, like so many Trump crises, a self-inflicted one. In the days after Trump tweeted that “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF,” his medical advisers, led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, implored Trump not to relax the government’s social distancing guidelines. Trump dug in. “His view was: I need to show people that there is light at the end of the tunnel,” a former West Wing official told me. Under pressure, members of the coronavirus task force discussed privately how parts of the country might be opened in April, but cautioned Trump not to get locked into a specific timetable given the deteriorating conditions in New York hospitals and ominous upticks in cases in New Orleans, Detroit, and elsewhere. “They discussed it internally, but they never intended Trump to announce it,” a Republican working with the task force told me.
Trump’s impulsive decision—and its messy aftermath—consumed the West Wing during the critical week that governors were pleading with the White House to deliver medical supplies before hospital systems began to collapse. “It was totally crazy,” the Republican told me. Dr. Fauci, Senator Lindsey Graham, and others raced to convince Trump that an Easter opening would be a cataclysmic error that could cost millions of lives. “This is a very, very stressful situation for everybody, including me,” Fauci told me in a phone interview on Monday. By last weekend Fauci’s arguments broke through: Trump agreed to extend the social distancing guidelines until the end of April.
Trump’s latest tonal and tactical shift (and almost certainly not the last) was driven by several factors, both personal and political. Trump learned that his close friend, 78-year-old New York real estate mogul Stan Chera, had contracted COVID-19 and fallen into a coma at NewYork-Presbyterian. “Boy, did that hit home. Stan is like one of his best friends,” said prominent New York Trump donor Bill White. Trump also grew concerned as the virus spread to Trump country. “The polling sucked. The campaign panicked about the numbers in red states. They don’t expect to win states that are getting blown to pieces with coronavirus,” a former West Wing official told me. From the beginning of the crisis, Trump had struggled to see it as anything other than a political problem, subject to his usual arsenal of tweets and attacks and bombast. But he ultimately realized that as bad as the stock market was, getting coronavirus wrong would end his presidency. “The campaign doesn’t matter anymore,” he recently told a friend, “what I do now will determine if I get reelected.”
For an ordinary West Wing dealing with a crisis of this magnitude, the chief of staff would be a central player, mediating, delegating, making the trains on time. But Trump has only very intermittently been able to tolerate another person with power in his White House. Mick Mulvaney had essentially been a lame duck for months, and since he was pushed out in early March, there’s been no chief of staff at all—Mark Meadows, whom Trump appointed weeks ago, only resigned his congressional seat on Monday to fill the post. “How can you not have a chief of staff during one of the biggest crises in American history?” a former West Wing official said.
Jared Kushner, who’s often been in competition with Trump’s chiefs of staff, continues to be the central West Wing player, leading a shadow coronavirus task force that is more powerful than the official group led by Vice President Mike Pence. In conversations Kushner has blamed HHS Secretary Alex Azar for the criticism Trump has received, according to a person in frequent touch with the West Wing. “This was a total mess,” Kushner told people when he got involved last month. “I know how to make this government run now,” he said, according to a source.
The White House downplayed tensions between Kushner and the task force. “The vice president and Jared work so well together because they both view their roles through the lens of what’s best for the American people and how do we best serve the president,” deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley said. “The task force has orchestrated a massive historic partnership between the public and private sector, coordinated the federal government’s urgent response, and has unleashed a whole-of-America approach that will save lives.”
In recent days Kushner has advocated for his usual, iconoclastic public-private approach, drawing on business contacts. Last week he called Wall Street executives and asked for advice on how to help New York, people briefed on the conversation said. Kushner encouraged Trump to push back against New York governor Andrew Cuomo after Cuomo gave an emotional press conference during which he said New York was short 30,000 ventilators. In a White House meeting around this time, Kushner told people that Cuomo was being an alarmist. “I have all this data about ICU capacity. I’m doing my own projections, and I’ve gotten a lot smarter about this. New York doesn’t need all the ventilators,” Kushner said, according to a person present. During an interview on Hannity on March 26, Trump said: “I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators.”
Kushner declined to comment. But the White House press shop sent a statement from Fauci: “The interactions between Jared Kushner and Vice President Pence have added real value to the discussions at the coronavirus task force. They complement each other very well by providing information and opinions derived from shared and sometimes different perspectives. The bottom line and goal of both of them is to always get the facts straight and to act on and make decisions based on the best available evidence.”
Meanwhile, Trump is also consulting his longtime confidante Hope Hicks, whom Trump hired back in February (Hicks had been serving as chief communications officer for Fox Corp., the parent company of Fox News).
Officially, Hicks reports to Kushner, but according to sources, Hicks is constantly with Trump. “Hope is in charge of Trump’s calendar, which means Jared is in charge of Trump’s schedule,” a Republican who deals with the White House said. Sources said Hicks prepares Trump for his daily task force briefings and advises him to act presidential. “She’s been trying to play to his better angles,” a former West Wing official said. (Given Trump’s recent blowups at reporters Yamiche Alcindor and Jim Acosta, Hicks’s influence has its limits.)
Hicks declined to comment. But Gidley, who is often in meetings with her and Trump, said: “No one has to give President Trump advice about being presidential—he is just a natural-born leader—and in this time of crisis, the country clearly sees the president is focused on the safety and security of the American people and always has their backs.”
In many ways Hicks fills the role she unofficially occupied during her first West Wing tour: Trump whisperer. She is shaping the White House’s messaging, which puts the current communications director, Stephanie Grisham, out of the loop. For weeks, according to sources, Kushner has been looking to sideline Grisham but has been unable to displace her because Grisham remains close to Melania Trump, whom Grisham did communications for when she worked in the East Wing. “Jared doesn’t tell Grisham what he’s working on. At this point Stephanie has just given up,” a person close to Grisham said. (Grisham declined to comment.)
Trump’s press conferences for the last few weeks had mostly been rally substitutes—boastful, contentious, featuring Trump as pitchman, selling the great job the administration was doing and the beautiful future after the novel coronavirus had magically flowed through, while compulsively blame-shifting to China, the media, governors, anyone but his own administration. But on Tuesday the event turned somber, with Trump trying to put the best possible face on a terrifying set of metrics—100,000 to 200,000 dead Americans, even if, as Dr. Deborah Birx said, safety measures continued—that he’d been trying to push away and wish away for weeks. Whatever his tone, it will be a very hard future to sell.
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