Saturday, July 18, 2020

Inside Trump’s Failure: The Rush to Abandon Leadership Role on the Virus
(NYT)

This is a major article. There are FIVE reporters listed as contributing: Michael D. Shear, Noah Weiland, Eric Lipton, Maggie Haberman, and her frequent partner, David E. Sanger. Let's have a look:

Each morning at 8 as the coronavirus crisis was raging in April, Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, convened a small group of aides to steer the administration through what had become a public health, economic and political disaster.

Seated around Mr. Meadows’s conference table and on a couch in his office down the hall from the Oval Office, they saw their immediate role as practical problem solvers. Produce more ventilators. Find more personal protective equipment. Provide more testing.

But their ultimate goal was to shift responsibility for leading the fight against the pandemic from the White House to the states. They referred to this as “state authority handoff,” and it was at the heart of what would become at once a catastrophic policy blunder and an attempt to escape blame for a crisis that had engulfed the country — perhaps one of the greatest failures of presidential leadership in generations.

Over a critical period beginning in mid-April, President Trump and his team convinced themselves that the outbreak was fading, that they had given state governments all the resources they needed to contain its remaining “embers” and that it was time to ease up on the lockdown.

In doing so, he was ignoring warnings that the numbers would continue to drop only if social distancing was kept in place, rushing instead to restart the economy and tend to his battered re-election hopes.
...
For scientific affirmation, they turned to Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the sole public health professional in the Meadows group. A highly regarded infectious diseases expert, she was a constant source of upbeat news for the president and his aides, walking the halls with charts emphasizing that outbreaks were gradually easing. The country, she insisted, was likely to resemble Italy, where virus cases declined steadily from frightening heights.

[I have never trusted Birx. She was always a willing enabler.]

On April 11, she told the coronavirus task force in the Situation Room that the nation was in good shape. 

A sharp pivot soon followed, with consequences that continue to plague the country today as the virus surges anew.

Even as a chorus of state officials and health experts warned that the pandemic was far from under control, Mr. Trump went, in a matter of days, from proclaiming that he alone had the authority to decide when the economy would reopen to pushing that responsibility onto the states...but almost immediately, Mr. Trump began criticizing Democratic governors who did not “liberate” their states.

Mr. Trump’s bet that the crisis would fade away proved wrong. But an examination of the shift in April and its aftermath shows that the approach he embraced was not just a misjudgment. Instead, it was a deliberate strategy that he would stick doggedly to as evidence mounted that, in the absence of strong leadership from the White House, the virus would continue to infect and kill large numbers of Americans.

He and his top aides would openly disdain the scientific research into the disease and the advice of experts on how to contain it, seek to muzzle more authoritative voices like Dr. Anthony S. Fauci and continue to distort reality even as it became clear that his hopes for a rapid rebound in the economy and his electoral prospects were not materializing.
...
...aides...came to view Dr. Fauci as a purveyor of dire warnings but no solutions and blamed officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for mishandling the early stages of the virus.

Dr. Birx was more central than publicly known to the judgment inside the West Wing that the virus was on a downward path...

The president quickly came to feel trapped by his own reopening guidelines. States needed declining cases to reopen, or at least a declining rate of positive tests. But more testing meant overall cases were destined to go up, undercutting the president’s push to crank up the economy. The result was to intensify Mr. Trump’s remarkable public campaign against testing, a vivid example of how he often waged war with science and his own administration’s experts and stated policies.

Mr. Trump’s bizarre public statements, his refusal to wear a mask and his pressure on states to get their economies going again left governors and other state officials scrambling to deal with a leadership vacuum. At one stage, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California was told that if he wanted the federal government to help obtain the swabs needed to test for the virus, he would have to ask Mr. Trump himself — and thank him.

Not until early June did White House officials even begin to recognize that their assumptions about the course of the pandemic had proven wrong. Even now there are internal divisions over how far to go in having officials publicly acknowledge the reality of the situation.
...
At a briefing on April 10, Mr. Trump predicted that the number of deaths in the United States from the pandemic would be “substantially” fewer than 100,000. As of Saturday, the death toll stood at 139,186, the pace of new deaths was rising again 


Trump’s Choice 

(original emphasis)

The president had a decision to make.

It was the end of March and his initial, 15-day effort to slow the spread of the virus by essentially shutting down the country was expiring in days....

“Do you really think we need to do this?” the president asked Dr. Fauci. “Yeah, we really do need to do it,” Dr. Fauci replied, explaining again the federal government’s role in making sure the virus did not explode across the country.
...
Mr. Trump’s willingness to go along...even as the president was acknowledging the need for tough decisions, he and his aides would soon be looking to do the opposite — build a public case that the federal government had completed its job and unshackle the president from ownership of the response.

The hub of the activity was the working group assembled by Mr. Meadows, who had just taken over as chief of staff.
...
Hope Hicks, the protector of Mr. Trump’s brand, was a regular participant...

Then there was Dr. Birx...Unlike Dr. Fauci...she was given an office near the Situation Room and freely roamed the West Wing, fully embracing her role as a member of the president’s team. [enabling]

By mid-April, Mr. Trump had grown publicly impatient with the stay-at-home recommendations he had reluctantly endorsed.

At the meetings in Mr. Meadows’s office, the issue was clear: How much longer do we keep this up?

To answer that, they focused on two more questions: Had the virus peaked? And had the government given the states the tools they needed to manage the remaining problems?

On the first question, Dr. Birx [was] optimistic...
...
later events would show the officials were oblivious to how widely it was already spreading.
...
The wind down of the federal government’s response would play out over the next several weeks. The daily briefings with Mr. Trump ended on April 24. The Meadows team started barring Dr. Fauci from making most television appearances, lest he go off message and suggest continued high risk from the virus.
...
On testing...By June the president was regularly making nonsensical statements like, “If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.”

...during the middle weeks of April the president’s decision to largely walk away from an active leadership role — and give many states permission to believe the worst of the crisis was behind them — came abruptly into public view.

On April 10, Mr. Trump declared that, in his role as something akin to a “wartime president,” it would be his decision about whether to reopen the country. “That’s my metrics,” he told reporters, pointing to his own head. “I would say without question it’s the biggest decision I’ve ever had to make.”

Three days later, he reiterated his responsibility. “When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total and that’s the way it’s got to be"...

The next day, Dr. Birx and Dr. Fauci presented Mr. Trump with a plan for issuing guidelines to start reopening the country at the end of the month. Developed largely by Dr. Birx ...the guidelines laid out broad, voluntary standards for states considering how fast to come out of the lockdown.

In political terms, the document’s message was that responsibility for dealing with the pandemic was shifting from Mr. Trump to the states.

On April 16, when Mr. Trump publicly announced the guidelines, he made the message to the governors explicit.

“You’re going to call your own shots”...

Birx’s Influence
(original emphasis, section heading)

Inside the White House, Dr. Birx was the chief evangelist for the idea that the threat from the virus was fading.

Unlike Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx is a strong believer in models that forecast the course of an outbreak. Dr. Fauci has cautioned that “models are only models” and that real-world outcomes depend on how people respond to calls for changes in behavior...
...
As the pandemic worsened, Dr. Fauci’s darker view of the circumstances was countered by the reassurances ostensibly offered by Dr. Birx’s data.
...
There were warnings that the models she studied might not be accurate, especially in predicting the course of the virus against a backdrop of evolving political, economic and social factors. Among the models Dr. Birx relied on most was one produced by researchers at the University of Washington. [IHME!] But when Mr. Hassett reviewed its performance by looking back on its predictions from three weeks earlier, it turned out to be hit or miss. [ho ho ho]
...
Some state officials were also alarmed by the administration’s use of the University of Washington model.

Colorado health officials wrote to the administration on April 10, pleading that the White House not use the model to allocate supplies to the state, saying its predictions were rosier than the grim reality they were encountering. 
...
...despite the outside warnings and evidence by early May that new infections, while down, remained higher than anticipated, the White House never fundamentally re-examined the course it had set in mid-April.
...
Dr. Birx regularly delivered what the new team was hoping for.

“All metros are stabilizing,” she would tell them, describing the virus as having hit its “peak” around mid-April...“We’re behind the worst of it.” She endorsed the idea that the death counts and hospitalization numbers could be inflated.
[Birx is the Dr. Mengele of the Trump Epidemic.]

She routinely told colleagues that the United States was on the same trajectory as Italy, which had huge spikes before infections and deaths flattened to close to zero.

“She said we were basically going to track Italy,” one senior adviser later recalled.

Dr. Birx would roam the halls of the White House, talking to Mr. Kushner, Ms. Hicks and others, sometimes passing out diagrams to bolster her case. “We’ve hit our peak,” she would say, and that message would find its way back to Mr. Trump.

Dr. Birx began using versions of the phrase “putting out the embers,” wording that was later picked up by the press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, and by Mr. Trump himself.

[Hey Birx take a look at these embers:]
By the middle of May, the task force believed that another resurgence was not likely until the fall, senior administration officials said.

But the models and analysis embraced by the West Wing failed to account for the weakening adherence to the lockdowns across the country that began even before Mr. Trump started urging governors to “liberate” their residents from the methodical guidelines his own government had established.

Dr. Birx’s belief that the United States would mirror Italy turned out to be disastrously wrong. 

The Consequences (original)

The real-world consequences of Mr. Trump’s abdication of responsibility rippled across the country.

...
...Kushner made it clear that the federal help would hinge on the governor doing him a favor.

“The governor of California, Gavin Newsom, had to call Donald Trump, and ask him for the swabs” recalled the adviser, Bob Kocher, an Obama-era White House health care official.
...
Mayor Francis X. Suarez of Miami, a Republican, said that the White House approach had only one focus: reopening businesses, instead of anticipating how cities and states should respond if cases surged again.

“It was all predicated on reduction, open, reduction, open more, reduction, open,” he said. “There was never what happens if there is an increase after you reopen?”

Other nations had moved aggressively to employ an array of techniques that Mr. Trump never mobilized on a federal level...

..."They just took accountability for getting it done. But we did not do that here. There was zero chance here that we would ever have been in a situation where we would be dealing with ‘embers.’ ”
-Andy Slavitt, a former federal health care official who had been advising the White House.


By early June, it was clear that the White House had gotten it wrong.
...
Digging into new data from Dr. Birx, they concluded the virus was in fact spreading with invisible ferocity during the weeks in May when states were opening up with Mr. Trump’s encouragement and many were all but declaring victory.

...Trump’s disdain for testing continues to affect the country. 
...
“When we were trying to get people to wear masks, they would point to the president and say, well, not something that we need to do."-Mayor Steve Adler of Austin.

“People follow leaders. People follow the people who are supposed to be leaders.”-Mayor Francis X. Suarez of Miami.


Wow. Tremendous work, Team Times. I have noticed in Maggie Haberman's reporting recently also that she has taken her gloves off. The characterizations used in this article, “Trump’s failure,” "catastrophic blunder," "one of the greatest failures of presidential leadership","remarkable," "bizarre," "walk away," "abdication of responsibility" "disastrously wrong," "oblivious," "chief evangelist"--these are not characterizations that one is accustomed seeing in New York Times reporting--because they have never had such a shit show to cover as this. You can feel the fire rising at the Times. The fire is spot on and they scorch those who should be scorched--Donald Trump and Dr. Deborah Birx.



ImageInside the White House, Dr. Birx was the chief evangelist for the idea that the threat from the virus was faUnlike Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx is a strong believer in models that forecast the course of an outbreak. Dr. Fauci has cautioned that “models are only models” and that real-world outcomes depend on how people respond to calls for changes in behavior



Posted by BENJAMIN HARRIS at 4:27 PM