28 Time March 30, 2020
for an inevitable outbreak. Luciana Borio, who
served as director of Medical and Biodefense Pre-
paredness on the NSC from 2017 through 2019, and
Trump’s own former Food and Drug Administration
commissioner, Scott Gottlieb, published a flurry of
op-eds. They warned that more cases were coming,
that the CDC couldn’t keep up with them and that
hospitals needed to prepare for an influx of patients.
Trump was unmoved. One possible reason: fear
of spooking markets. “The President hates to admit
to anything that could affect the economic success
negatively,” says a former Administration official,
who requested anonymity to describe discussions
with the President. Instead, the Trump Administra-
tion’s response was “ad hoc,” says Kenneth Bernard,
a retired rear admiral and physician who served both
Bill Clinton’s and George W. Bush’s administrations.
At first, Secretary of Health
and Human Services Alex Azar
was in charge of coordinating
interagency response. Then
on Feb. 26, Trump tapped Vice
President Mike Pence to take
over. Pence attempted to fix
the disastrous shortfall of di-
agnostic tests and began try-
ing to educate the public to the
dangers the disease could pose.
He brought in a well-connected
global disease expert, Dr. Deb-
orah Birx, to coordinate with
other countries and U.S. agen-
cies. As the crisis grew, Pence reached out to Demo-
cratic governors in Washington and California and
met with top Democrats on the Hill.
As his Vice President scrambled to embrace the
experts, Trump’s extended family got involved.
On the night of March 11, Dr. Kurt Kloss—whose
daughter is married to the brother of Jared Kushner,
Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser —posted to a
doctors’ Facebook group, asking for suggestions on
how the White House should address the outbreak,
according to the Spectator. The next morning, after
hundreds of doctors had replied, Kloss sent Kush-
ner a list of ideas.
Trump’s more public efforts weren’t faring much
better. The same day Kushner was working his kin,
Trump and his top advisers huddled in the Oval Office
to discuss how to respond to days of losses in the
stock market. Azar, Birx and Assistant Secretary for
Preparedness and Response Robert Kadlec, among
others, presented data on the escalating infection
rates inside the U.S. and urged him to restrict travel
from Europe. They told Trump that clusters of
COVID-19 in New York’s Westchester County and
in Florida had originated with people traveling from
the Continent, according to a senior Administration
official with knowledge of the decision. Without
consulting his European allies, the President agreed
to the plan and his aides hustled to write a speech.
A few hours later, Trump was seated in the Oval
Office, delivering his sternest address about the
corona virus outbreak so far. When it was over, he
walked with Azar to his private study, but it was
already clear the speech had not gone well. European
allies were furious, U.S. stock futures plunged more
than 5%, and even Trump’s former Homeland Security
Adviser, Thomas Bossert, seemed flummoxed by
the news. “There’s little value to European travel
restrictions,” he tweeted. “Poor use of time & energy.”
The next day, the Dow Jones and S&P 500 Index
tanked 9.5%: Wall Street’s worst day since 1987.As Trump sTruggled to find his footing in the
crisis, other American leaders were taking action.
On March 13, around the time that the President
was holding a press conference to declare a national
emergency—and yet again telling reporters that
he bore no responsibility for his Administration’s
response—more than 100 mayors of America’s
largest cities were gathering on a conference call.
In the absence of clear federal guidance, they
compared notes on how to fight the virus, traded
ideas about ending utility cutoffs and discussed who
was banning large gatherings and what to do about
schools. One mayor on the call told TIME that the
leaders whose cities had already been affected by
the outbreak had an urgent message for their peers:
“You must act now.”
The result has been a patchwork of significant but
disjointed state and local efforts to combat COVID-- Washington State, which was hit particularly
hard and early, was among the first to declare a state
of emergency—two weeks before Trump did so on
the national level. “It was more than frustrating that
for what seemed like an enormous length of time,
we weren’t getting information shared right from
the White House,” Washington Governor Jay Inslee
tells TIME. California Governor Gavin Newsom
issued sweeping guidelines allowing the state to
commandeer hotels to treat coronavirus patients,
while Colorado Governor Jared Polis used executive
authority to screen visitors to nursing homes.
Ohio Governor DeWine has been among the most
proactive. “The advice that we got was: If you wait
two more weeks, it’s too late,” he says. On March 12,
he announced that Ohio would be the first state in
the nation to close schools statewide for at least
three weeks. Two days later, he held separate calls
with Ohio veterinarians and dentists, asking them
to delay appointments. “They use some of the same
personal protection gear that doctors use,” DeWine
says. “Save the equipment. If you’ve got extra masks
and other things, make those available. We’re going
to need them before this thing is over.”
Over the course of a week, Trump slowly got with
CORONAVIRUS
20 %
Possible unemployment rate
if Congress doesn’t pass
a massive stimulus, per
Treasury Secretary Mnuchin