It’s been over a year since the pandemic officially began in the United States, but with the Delta variant ravaging the country, many are still wondering how the hell we got here. Molly Jong-Fast, host of The New Abnormal podcast, is among them.
While the arrival of COVID-19 isn’t former President Donald Trump’s fault, critics say his early response to the pandemic is responsible for the virus’ never-ending spread among Americans. In reporting the new book I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, journalists Carol D. Leonnig and Philip Rucker found those critics are on to something.
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Leonnig and Rucker interviewed former Trump White House staff to paint a picture of what was really happening on the inside at the time, and according to them, the former president made two major COVID mistakes from the onset. The first is that he didn’t push terribly hard on the team in China investigating the virus.
“Many of the doctors confided—all of the medical experts agreed and confided—to their friends and colleagues that could have changed the arc of this disease,” Leonnig says in this bonus episode.
The second is that Trump didn’t follow the advice of medical experts. It also didn’t help that his son-in-law, Jared Kusher, wanted to have a hand in everything but ended up not really doing anything helpful.
According to Rucker, who also joined the pod, Kushner was Trump’s PR man during the early part of the pandemic and was concerned mainly with the president’s re-election. And that’s likely why all of the COVID response criticism leveled at Trump got deflected to the state governors.
“At any opportunity, he tried to find ways to have the governors take the blame or let the governors take the hit, or just whatever it took to shift public accountability and responsibility away from the White House,” says Rucker.
The pair also tell Molly what it was like talking to people who worked closely with Trump, why they stayed so long by his side, and discuss rumors that the Pentagon feared Trump would use the military to stay in power.
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