How Jared and Ivanka Hijacked the White House’s Covid Response

No one in the Trump inner circle seemed to be taking the new virus too seriously at first. During a meeting with Modi in India, Trump mentioned the 34 people who were suffering from Covid-19 in quarantine on military ships. He complained that the news was affecting the stock market. “I wonder if this is overrated versus the flu,” he said. Of course, those 34 people would not be the only ones to contract the disease. As the number grew, Trump still seemed resistant to doing anything too drastic. Contrary to what he would say later, he didn’t immediately want to ban travel to China. And he asked officials in the White House if we were making “too big a deal out of this.”

On March 11, 2020, one of my deputies came into my office to let me know that they had stumbled into a meeting among Hope Hicks (who had just returned to the White House as counselor to the president after a two-year stint at Fox), Jared, and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone. The WHO had just declared Covid a pandemic, and the three of them had apparently been discussing the need for the president to give an address to the nation on Covid-19 from the Oval Office that evening. An address to the nation is serious stuff, and whenever possible you need plenty of time to prepare properly — unless, of course, you were in the Trump White House, where everything was like a clown car on fire running at full speed into a warehouse full of fireworks.

A couple of hours later, a meeting was called in the Oval Office so that members of the Coronavirus Task Force could brief the president on the latest involving the virus. I wasn’t invited to that either, which was typical. Meetings just “happened” all the time in that White House. Random people would wander into the Oval Office and start talking about random things, and suddenly something would be decided or Trump would agree to do something — and anyone who wasn’t in the room would find out about it later on Twitter or on cable news. So I invited myself.

In attendance at the meeting were the two new stars of the Trump administration, Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx. I guess you could include Robert Redfield, the CDC director, on that list, but he was kind of an afterthought. Fauci and Birx — especially Fauci — ran that particular show. Trump had liked Fauci — for about ten minutes. Then he had decided, as most everyone in the White House did, that Fauci was a showboat who liked seeing his face on television. The Office of the Vice President tried to keep him in line and make sure his statements were coordinated with ours, but it seemed that Fauci couldn’t care less what we thought. I will say this: He sure knew a heck of a lot more about Covid and other infectious diseases than the rest of us ever could. So I couldn’t blame people for listening to him. But let’s not pretend he didn’t love being a media hero.

The meeting was packed. Redfield, Birx and Fauci were sitting in front of the…