michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

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Last week, President Trump sounded newly serious about combating the coronavirus, calling himself a quote, “wartime president.” Maggie Haberman on why days later, and with the situation only worsening, the president is abandoning that message. It’s Wednesday, March 25.

maggie haberman

Hello, guys.

michael barbaro

Hi.

maggie haberman

Hi.

michael barbaro

Maggie, it is Tuesday afternoon. Can you tell us about what just happened on the Fox News Channel?

archived recording (bill hemmer) Over the next two hours, the president, the vice president, and the officials tasked with leading our nation’s response on the virus pandemic will join us to answer your questions all across America.

michael barbaro

We just saw Vice President Mike Pence and President Trump sit for two hours at a town hall meeting — virtual town hall meeting — with Fox News from the White House, where they took questions by remote.

archived recording I think a lot of us right now are just wondering, what is the potential for a national stay-at-home order? Is this something that America could be seeing in our near future?

maggie haberman

Pence answered a bunch of questions first.

archived recording (mike pence) Carly, I can tell you that at no point has the White House coronavirus task force discussed what some people call a nationwide lockdown.

maggie haberman

Then, President Trump came on for the second hour.

archived recording (donald trump) Our people are full of vim and vigor and energy. They don’t want to be locked into a house or an apartment or some space. It’s not for our country. We’re not — we’re not built that way.

maggie haberman

And his message was even louder of a message that he’s been delivering for the last day or so, which is that while we have to take the coronavirus seriously —

archived recording (donald trump) You know, I don’t want the cure to be worse than the problem itself.

maggie haberman

— in his words, the cure can’t be worse than the disease.

archived recording (donald trump) — the problem being, obviously, the problem. And you know, you can destroy a country this way by closing it down.

maggie haberman

And by that, he means that the hits to the economy are becoming unsustainable. That it can’t go on forever.

archived recording (donald trump) You’re going to lose people. You’re going to have suicides by the thousands. You’re going to have all sorts of things happen. You’re going to have instability. You can’t just come in and say, let’s close up the United States of America, the biggest, the most successful country in the world by far.

maggie haberman

And then he broke some news.

archived recording (donald trump) I’d love to have it open by Easter. OK? I would love to have it open by Easter. archived recording Oh wow, OK.

maggie haberman

And that news was that he believes that by April 12, which is Easter, that that could be when the country and its economy are reopened.

archived recording (donald trump) It’s such an important day for other reasons, but I’ll make it an important day for this, too. I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter.

michael barbaro

Maggie, this seems very much at odds with the messaging coming from more local leaders and health officials in the areas of the U.S. that have been most directly hit by this pandemic so far. I’m thinking, for example, of the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, who was warning New York residents —

archived recording (andrew cuomo) Look, this can go on for several months, OK?

michael barbaro

— that they should be preparing for four, six —

archived recording (andrew cuomo) — eight months, nine months.

michael barbaro

Nine months of life under isolation and shutdown to fight the coronavirus.

maggie haberman

Michael, about half an hour or so before Mike Pence started this town hall —

archived recording (andrew cuomo) You have 20,000 ventilators in the stockpile. Release the ventilators to New York.

maggie haberman

— Andrew Cuomo was pleading with the federal government to send more resources, especially ventilators, because the number of cases that are severe in New York is growing and keeps getting bigger and bigger. And it is outpacing the number of materials that they have for doctors to treat them.

archived recording (andrew cuomo) I need the ventilators in 14 days. Only the federal government has that power.

maggie haberman

You have health officials in New York, health officials in California, health officials in President Trump’s own government saying we are not just a mere two or three weeks away from things going back to normal. And they’re basing that not just on idle projections, but watching what those curves have looked like in terms of the spread of the virus.

michael barbaro

Also, Maggie, help us understand how we got here and why this is the message from the president at this critical moment — when how we respond, what measures we take, and how long we take those measures really matters. And so I wonder where you think that starts. Where do we begin to understand that?

maggie haberman

Michael, you need to go back to January 22 when the president was in Davos for the World Economic Forum.

archived recording (joe kernen) It’s great to see you. Thank you for joining us again in Davos. We’ve done this before. archived recording (donald trump) That’s right.

maggie haberman

And he did an interview with CNBC. And at that point, the virus was already in the U.S.

archived recording (joe kernen) The C.D.C. has identified a case of coronavirus in Washington state.

maggie haberman

And he was asked by the interviewer if he was concerned that this could become a pandemic.

archived recording (joe kernen) Have you been briefed by the C.D.C.? archived recording (donald trump) I have. archived recording (joe kernen) Are there worries about a pandemic at this point? archived recording (donald trump) No, we’re not at all.

maggie haberman

And the president’s response was, no, not at all.

archived recording (donald trump) It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine. archived recording (joe kernen) OK.

maggie haberman

He didn’t want to talk about it publicly at the time.

michael barbaro

And why do you think that was?

maggie haberman

Well, according to a number of people who were in contact with him, it was because he didn’t want to rattle the financial markets. That he was hoping that it was going to stay under control, and the stock markets are his political weathervane, and he thinks they need to stay up in order for him to win re-election. And he didn’t want to do anything to disturb that. And he didn’t want to create a panic.

michael barbaro

OK. So what happened next?

maggie haberman

So after that, a couple of days later, as there were more cases and it was clear that it was spreading out of China — where it originated — the president took this move that he was widely criticized for by Democrats and even some Republicans at the time. Which was he halted a number of flights from China into the U.S.

archived recording (sean hannity) Disney’s closed. archived recording (donald trump) Yeah. archived recording (sean hannity) Movie theaters are closed. Hospitals being built. I think we’re now up to our eighth case in the United States. How concerned are you? archived recording (donald trump) Well, we pretty much shut it down coming in from China.

maggie haberman

The idea was to halt the spread of the disease, keep transmissions to a minimum. He was accused of xenophobia. He was accused of making a racist move. At the end of the day, it was probably effective, because it did actually take a pretty aggressive measure against the spread of the virus. The problem is, it was one of the last things that he did for several weeks.

michael barbaro

Hmm. So the right decision in retrospect, but not accompanied by similar actions that might have contained transmission.

maggie haberman

That’s exactly right. In the same way that George W. Bush was criticized for his “Mission Accomplished” banner about Iraq, the president treated that moment as if it was his mission accomplished moment. He did not do anything after that in terms of alerting the public, or telling people to be safe, or telling people to take precautions. And it basically squandered several weeks within the U.S.

michael barbaro

Right. Looking back at the timeline, we can now see that on the same day that the president stopped those flights from China, the coronavirus was already being reported by the W.H.O. in Japan and South Korea, and those countries are still sending their citizens to the United States on flights that have not been stopped. So the horse is out of the barn.

maggie haberman

Exactly. It was not anything close to a “whole-of-government approach.” And at that point, there was a task force that was formed, and it was being led by the health and human services secretary, Alex Azar. But it was outside of the White House, and it was rife with all kinds of turf battles. And the president, meanwhile, was still trying not to talk about it.

michael barbaro

And succeeding in that, for the most part.

maggie haberman

And succeeding in that, for the most part. It was not something that came up in interviews that he did, which were mostly with friendly interviewers who weren’t going to ask him things that he didn’t want to talk about. And look, it’s not as if it wasn’t getting news coverage. The New York Times had it on the front page almost every day from the end of January. It was very clear that this was a global crisis, but it was not being treated as an American crisis. And I think a lot of that is because the president just was not talking about it.

michael barbaro

And do we know what information the president is receiving during this time? Is he getting a bunch of briefings — one would think he would be — that are conveying the seriousness of the approaching situation?

maggie haberman

There’s conflicting information, Michael, about exactly how specific and how alarmed the briefing materials the president was receiving were at this time. We understand that a lot of folks in the National Security Council were taking it very seriously, and that information had been passed to him. We understand that Alex Azar, the health and human services secretary, took it very seriously, but it’s not clear that he was sharing all of that with the president or that he was being allowed to tell it to the president. There were some people in the White House who viewed Alex Azar in particular as quote-unquote “alarmist” — thought that he was overstating the threat. And when the president doesn’t want to take something particularly seriously, he’ll often poll test advisers until he finds the one who agrees with him that he shouldn’t take it seriously. And I have every reason to believe that he was looking for people to affirm his sense that this didn’t really need to be addressed. And one of the places that he would go to hear his own thoughts affirmed or for solace was Fox News.

archived recording (jeanine pirro) If you’ve ever had a question whether the mainstream media distorts, whips up, throw things out of focus or has an agenda, especially when it comes to the Trump administration, look no further than coronavirus.

maggie haberman

They were very much echoing what he believed and wanted to believe, which was that the criticisms about inactivity that he wasn’t doing enough was all part of an effort to harm him.

archived recording (trish regan) This is yet another attempt to impeach the president. And sadly, it seems they care very little for any of the destruction they are leaving in their wake — losses in the stock market. All this, unfortunately, just part of the political casualties for them.

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maggie haberman

At this point, the president is in India being fitted by Prime Minister Modi, and public health officials start basically taking matters into their own hands. They start giving public warnings. One top health expert gave a press briefing where she said that —

archived recording (dr. nancy messonnier) Now, it’s not so much a question of if this will happen anymore, but rather more a question of exactly when this will happen.

maggie haberman

It was no longer a question of if the virus would spread in the United States, but when.

archived recording (dr. nancy messonnier) And how many people in this country will become infected, and how many of those will develop severe or more complicated disease.

maggie haberman

And that hospitals and businesses and schools should start making preparations accordingly.

michael barbaro

Right.

maggie haberman

This was as the president was now on his way back from India, and the stock market reacted terribly to these warnings. And the president was furious. He called the health and human services secretary, saying that the remarks had rattled people. He called one of his top economic advisers, Larry Kudlow, wondering what could be done to stop the slide. But at this point, as angry as the president was, it was clear to him and to his advisers that this was no longer something he could ignore.

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michael barbaro

We’ll be right back. So Maggie, what happens once the president recognizes that this is something that has to be addressed?

maggie haberman

The president put Vice President Mike Pence in charge of the task force.

archived recording (mike pence) Good afternoon. We just completed today’s lengthy meeting of the White House coronavirus task force.

maggie haberman

And that was a big moment, because this task force that had been kind of diffuse and fighting with itself was for the first time being run from the White House. And it was meant to signal that the president was taking this seriously. So Mike Pence had control of this thing for basically two weeks. And during that time —

archived recording (mike pence) We’re continuing to lean into this effort in full partnership with state and local health authorities around the country —

maggie haberman

— he was trying to communicate that they were working on a plan —

archived recording (mike pence) — to ensure that we do everything to prevent the spread of the disease.

maggie haberman

To address the spread, that they were working on guidelines, that they were aware of problems with testing for this virus that have plagued this administration for weeks.

archived recording (mike pence) To mitigate its expansion and to provide necessary treatment to Americans that have been impacted.

maggie haberman

And after two weeks, Vice President Mike Pence was getting a lot of praise for his demeanor in these briefings.

archived recording (mike pence) If I may, we’ll be back here every day. Get used to seeing us. We’re going to bring the experts in. We’re going to make sure and give you the best and most high quality, real time information from the best people in the world. So thank you all for being here. archived recording Thank you. You’re welcome back any time.

maggie haberman

And that became a point of concern for some of President Trump’s own advisers, who didn’t want to see Mike Pence get all of the attention.

michael barbaro

Huh. So the people around the president didn’t want the vice resident, rather than the president, to be the one seen as quarterbacking this major national crisis?

maggie haberman

That’s right. There was concern among the president’s top advisers that it would look as if Vice President Pence was basically doing the job the president should be doing — calming a nation, giving out accurate information, sounding as if he’s in charge. And that led to this idea that the president should give an Oval Office address. So on March 11, the same day the W.H.O. declared the coronavirus a global pandemic, President Trump sat in the Oval Office behind the Resolute Desk at 9 p.m., and the klieg lights came on and the teleprompter started rolling. And he gave an address to the nation.

archived recording (donald trump) My fellow Americans, tonight I want to speak with you about our nation’s unprecedented response to the coronavirus outbreak that started in China and is now spreading throughout the world.

maggie haberman

For the first time, he acknowledged that this could impact older people.

archived recording (donald trump) The highest risk is for elderly population with underlying health conditions. The elderly population must be very, very careful.

maggie haberman

He talked about a ban on most travel from Europe.

archived recording (donald trump) To keep new cases from entering our shores, we will be suspending all travel from Europe to the United States for the next 30 days. The new rules will go into effect Friday at midnight.

maggie haberman

But the address, which was brief, as Oval Office addresses usually are, was seen as a disaster.

michael barbaro

Why?

maggie haberman

The President looked uncomfortable. He stumbled over the teleprompter, which he never does well with.

archived recording (donald trump) I am confident that by counting and continuing to take these tough measures, we will —

maggie haberman

And it was riddled with errors, including about the travel ban.

archived recording (donald trump) — and these prohibitions will not only apply to the tremendous amount of trade in cargo, but various other things as we get approval.

maggie haberman

He suggested that it would apply to cargo and trade. It didn’t, and those mistakes sent the stock markets plummeting.

michael barbaro

Right. And my assumption was that the President hoped the speech would do the exact opposite, which is it would give confidence to the stock market and send it back up.

maggie haberman

That’s right. The markets continued to tank over the next couple of days. And aides started realizing that there had to be a major course correction or the presidency could be threatened. And the President realized this too. So on March 17 —

archived recording (donald trump) I would like to begin by announcing some important developments in our war against the Chinese virus.

maggie haberman

— we saw a pretty different tone from President Trump as he talked about this virus.

archived recording (donald trump) We’ll be invoking the Defense Production Act just in case we need it. Last week, I signed an emergency declaration under the Stafford Act.

maggie haberman

He described it soberly. He suddenly seemed willing to answer questions without being combative.

archived recording (journalist) Do you consider America to be on a wartime footing in terms of fighting this virus? archived recording (donald trump) I do. I actually do. I’m looking at it that way, because you know —

maggie haberman

He described himself as a wartime president. He seemed to be taking this seriously in all of the ways that a nation usually looks for a leader to take such a crisis seriously.

archived recording (donald trump) It’s a very tough situation, here. You have to do things. You have to close parts of an economy that six weeks ago were the best they’ve ever been. We had the best economy we’ve ever had. And then one day you have to close it down in order to defeat this enemy. But we’re doing it, and we’re doing it well. And I’d say the American people have been incredible.

maggie haberman

This was dramatically different from what we had heard just a few days earlier.

michael barbaro

Well, so, Maggie, how then do we get to today, where one week later, the situation with this pandemic has only gotten dramatically worse? The virus is exploding in places like New York. The number of infections and deaths are rising across the country. And yet, the president’s message has now kind of reverted back to where it was weeks and weeks ago. His language has changed. His overall comportment and the words he’s using — they’ve all kind of returned to a period where he was not taking this as seriously.

maggie haberman

There have been people in the President’s circle who, this entire time, even as the President changed his tone, still thought that some of the moves that the government was making were too aggressive. And those aides started, late last week, talking about the fact that they might want to revisit some of these guidelines and ease up on some of them for targeted groups after this initial 15-day period had ended, which is going to be March 30th. The president started getting the message in earnest on Sunday night that this is something that he needed to worry about. That there might not be an economy to return to once the country was fully back to normal. And so he tweeted on Sunday night that the cure couldn’t be worse than the disease. And that was the beginning of a massive shift of the federal government, which had moved toward aggressive measures to mitigate this virus and its spread, to suddenly suggesting that they could see the end nearing.

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archived recording (donald trump) We can’t lose a Boeing. And we can’t lose some of these companies. And companies — frankly, Bill — that were solid as, like, AAA companies. Because of what’s happened over the last couple of weeks, they go from AAA to being, like, they could use a hand. archived recording Tough time. archived recording (donald trump) We can’t — you’re right. We can’t lose those companies. If we lose those companies, were talking about hundreds of thousands of jobs, millions of jobs. The faster we go back, the better it’s going to be. We have a pent-up energy that’s going to be unbelievable.

michael barbaro

Is there a meaningful contingency of conservative leaders, thinkers, and politicians, economists even, people in business who feel this way, who feel like there’s been an overreaction to this virus in the form of shutting down the American economy?

maggie haberman

There are. Some of them are people who have been the president’s advisers on and off for a while, like Stephen Moore of FreedomWorks, who’s an economist and who advised the president at various points. He wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal with Art Laffer, who the president gave the Medal of Freedom to not that long ago. And in that op-ed, they said, essentially, that the government can’t sustain this. That the economy can’t sustain this. And that there needs to be less draconian moves made to keep people safe but still allow the country to run.

michael barbaro

Mm-hmm.

maggie haberman

There is no public health expert in the government telling the president that these moves are too severe. There is no public health expert in the government telling the president that the curve is about to let up on the spread of the virus. Everything the president has done about this virus has been a reaction to something, and right now he is reacting to pressure to reopen portions of the economy, as the job losses are facing potential millions by April.

michael barbaro

You know, I don’t know whether the President would frame it this way, but I wonder if he’s forcing all of us to reckon with what is the ultimate moral dilemma of this pandemic, which is what economic and social cost we’re willing to pay to save some uncertain number of lives. And he seems to be saying, in effect, I’m willing to take the risk that a certain number of Americans will get sick and will die for the greater economic good and health of the United States.

archived recording (donald trump) I mean, think of it. We average 36,000 people — death, death. I’m not talking about cases, I’m talking about death. 36,000 deaths a year. People die, 36 — from the flu. But we’ve never closed down the country for the flu. So you say to yourself, what is this all about? Now — archived recording How did you — archived recording (donald trump) It’s never been done. archived recording How did you process that? archived recording (donald trump) Not good. I wasn’t happy about it.

maggie haberman

Michael, I think that’s very much what he’s saying. And in fairness to him, Governor Cuomo has openly voiced the same moral dilemma that he is wrestling with. It’s just that Governor Cuomo came down on the other side of it, which was that there is no cost that can be put on human life.

archived recording (andrew cuomo) Yeah, my mother is not expendable. And your mother is not expendable. And our brothers and sisters they’re not expendable. And we’re not going to accept a premise that human life is disposable. And we’re not going to put a dollar figure on human life. The first order of business is save lives, period. Whatever it costs.

maggie haberman

New York has been, as we know, much harder hit than most of the rest of the country. Most of the rest of the country has not had to go through what New York is going through right now with surges in hospital stays and a number of sick people. The president says most of the country agrees with him, and maybe that’s why.

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But the president is taking a really large gamble, and going with his gut, that the greater good will be served for the rest of the country by trying to preserve the economic health of the country more quickly than his health experts would like him to.

michael barbaro

Maggie, thank you very much.

maggie haberman

Michael, thank you.

michael barbaro

On Tuesday night, Dr. Anthony Fauci, an infectious disease specialist and an influential member of the president’s coronavirus task force, was asked about the president’s plan to reopen the U.S. economy by Easter.

archived recording (journalist) Where are you now with this timeline of 19 days from now? archived recording (dr. anthony fauci) So that’s really very flexible. We just had a conversation with the president in the Oval Office talking about, you know, you can look at a date, but you’ve got to be very flexible. On a literally day-by-day and week-by-week basis, you need to evaluate the feasibility of what you’re trying to do.

michael barbaro

With the president standing beside him, Fauci said it would be foolhardy to ease restrictions if major parts of the country were still in the throes of the pandemic.

archived recording (dr. anthony fauci) Obviously, no one is going to want to tone down things when you see what’s going on in a place like New York City. I mean, that’s just, you know, good public health practice and common sense.

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michael barbaro

We’ll be right back. Here’s what else you need to know today.

archived recording (narendra modi) [SPEAKING HINDI]

michael barbaro

Nationwide lockdowns over the virus continued on Tuesday with India becoming the latest and largest country to require citizens to remain indoors, in India’s case, for the next 21 days.

archived recording (narendra modi) [SPEAKING HINDI]

michael barbaro

In a televised speech, Prime Minister Narendra Modi told Indians, quote, “If you can’t handle these 21 days, this country will go back 21 years.” And in the United States, Senate leaders said they were nearing a deal on a historic $2 trillion stimulus bill after days of objections from Democrats over who would monitor billions of dollars in loans to American businesses.

archived recording (chuck schumer) We’ve been fighting very hard that any bailout fund — money to industries that have trouble — have real oversight and transparency. That’s vitally important.

michael barbaro

On Tuesday, Democrats said they had persuaded Republicans and the Trump administration to allow an independent inspector and a congressional oversight board to scrutinize the loans, and were almost ready to support the bill.

archived recording (chuck schumer) I hope, I pray, that we can come together very quickly and pass in large numbers a bipartisan bill that will help the American people who so badly, badly, badly need our help.

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michael barbaro