Rose Garden rendezvous that has spiked Team Trump
At best the White House party was seen as reckless flouting of COVID guidelines, at worst a superspreader event, throwing the US republic’s future into confusion.
Last Saturday afternoon was in many ways the zenith of Donald Trump’s presidency. The victorious moment when he nominated a third justice, Amy Coney Barrett, to the Supreme Court, a move that was expected to install a durable conservative majority on the hallowed bench.
Ignoring the coronavirus, as he has so often done before, Trump held a party at the White House. For the great and the good of conservative politics who gathered that day in the Rose Garden, shaking hands and slapping backs, this was an occasion to celebrate.
Yet mostly maskless and crammed together on folding seats, the 150-plus guests observed few of the standard pandemic protocols urged by the Trump administration’s own doctors. When the festivities went indoors, with receptions held in the White House’s diplomatic room and cabinet room, maskless VIPs continued to mingle at close quarters, trading gossip and Washington shop talk.
.@WhiteHouse press office just sent out a “photos of the week†email including (wait for it) new pics of Amy Coney Barrett event in Rose Garden, where several attendees may have contracted Covid. Good for contact tracing I guess. pic.twitter.com/2fjPmilQ2N
— Peter Spiegel (@SpiegelPeter) October 3, 2020
Now eight prominent attendees on that increasingly fateful afternoon have tested positive for the virus, including the first lady and the president, who on Friday was flown to hospital in his Marine One helicopter. The Rose Garden party has taken on a hubristic hue, at best a reckless flouting of well-established guidelines, at worst a superspreader event that has crippled the White House, frozen the president’s re-election campaign and thrown the future of the American republic itself into confusion.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 2, 2020
Images of Mike Lee, the Utah senator, hugging and embracing colleagues at the event now look very different in the light of his positive diagnosis. As does footage of Kellyanne Conway, a former Adviser who has also tested positive, seen in close conversation with the Attorney-General William Barr. The Rev John Jenkins, president of Notre Dame University in Indiana, has expressed regret for his “error of judgment” in not wearing a mask and shaking hands with other guests. He too has tested positive.
Footage from the White House event last weekend is unbelievable. No masks, no social distancing, lots of hugging and lots of handshakes.
— Raf Sanchez (@rafsanchez) October 3, 2020
Senator Mike Lee (hugging in first shot) is just one of several guests at event who now have COVID. via @bubbaprog pic.twitter.com/0TdWVj5MJl
The virus has ripped through the upper echelons of the Trump administration at alarming speed. It began with his closest aide, Hope Hicks, who tested positive on Thursday morning. By Friday night Trump’s presidential campaign manager Bill Stepien had tested positive too, along with Republican senators Thom Tillis and Ron Johnson, as well as the Republican national committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel.
At the centre of it all is Trump. His symptoms began on Friday - fever, chills, congestion and a cough. After being treated with an experimental cocktail of antibodies at the White House, he was short of breath and was given oxygen, prompting the decision by the president and his team that he should move to the Walter Reed military hospital in nearby Bethesda, Maryland.
Trump and his team reportedly wanted footage of him walking to his helicopter, while they were certain that he still had the energy to do so.
For a man who has persistently sought to play down the gravity of the pandemic - and who even last week was promising a swift return to normality - it is a shattering blow.
With a month to go until the American people decide whether to grant him four more years in office, Trump wanted to shift the national conversation away from the virus. Instead, he has caught it.
“On Monday, the entire city of Washington had just 14 new cases of Covid,” said Liz Oxhorn, a former senior aide in Barack Obama’s administration.
“The Trump White House alone is now responsible for 23 new cases and counting. They had every privilege available to limit the spread of the disease and they blew it. It’s hard not to be furious.”
For perspective: We were about hit the target of 5 cases per 100,000. Our positivity rate was approaching 1.5%. We are trying to get kids back in schools in Nov. Grocery and transit workers are masked for 8 hour shifts. But the White House threw a maskless super-spreader party.
— Liz Oxhorn (@lizoxhorn) October 3, 2020
As the virus spreads through Trump’s team, the president’s schedule in the days after the Barrett nomination party - crammed with rallies, flights and fundraisers - is being fiercely scrutinised.
On Sunday, after a trip to his golf course in Virginia, Trump hunkered down with key aides to prepare for Tuesday’s presidential debate. Two of those aides, Conway and Stepien, have tested positive. Another Adviser present, the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, said none of them wore masks at the session. Yesterday (Saturday) he announced that he too had tested positive.
On the Monday, Trump appeared in the Rose Garden to hail a new testing strategy for the coronavirus. “I say it all the time, we are rounding the corner,” he told reporters.
At the presidential debateitself, on Tuesday night in Cleveland, Ohio, Trump arrived too late to be tested, according to moderator Chris Wallace. The Fox News host said they relied on an “honour system” for the candidates’ testing status.
During the debate, Trump mocked his opponent for excessive mask-wearing. “He could be speaking 200ft away from them and he shows up with the biggest mask I’ve ever seen,” said Trump, pointing at Joe Biden. “I put a mask on when I think I need it.”
The first sign of trouble came the following night in Duluth, Minnesota. After an unusually short 45-minute rally, Trump’s aide and confidante Hicks began showing symptoms on the journey home.
She isolated on air force One and then took a test the next morning, which came back positive. Her diagnosis was not revealed to the public or even to some of her own colleagues.
On Thursday afternoon the president departed for a fundraiser at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. Chief of staff Mark Meadows removed several aides who might have been exposed to Hicks from the trip. But Trump went on to interact with donors indoors at his club.
“Trump thought he could go to the fundraiser and keep the secret that Hicks had it,” the Republican donor Dan Eberhart told The Washington Post.
For Olivia Troye, who until recently was a homeland security Adviser to the vice-president, Mike Pence, the Hicks revelations set off all sorts of alarm bells.
“I found the timeline of how they were releasing the information about Hope Hicks suspect,” she said.
“I had a feeling there was something more going on behind the scenes.”
Troye spent two years working for Pence, including as a key figure on the coronavirus taskforce headed by the vice-president.
However, she left the White House two weeks ago and has become a whistleblower, criticising what she described as the “failed” pandemic response in the White House and the president’s “disregard for human life”.
Troye has long foreseen the possibility of a pandemic outbreak inside the White House and was immediately suspicious when Hicks fell ill. “Given the culture of the White House, I’m actually surprised that it took this long,” she said.
“I know that half of these people think that they are untouchable and invincible. That it’s not going to affect them. They’re very cavalier about it.”
Troye said the “claustrophobic” West Wing, where the president and his senior advisers work, was a potential Petri dish of contagion and heedless behaviour.
“The doctors have said wearing a mask is critical, yet you could be in the situation room or the Oval [Office] and have all these senior officials sitting with the leader of our country, and the vice-president, with no masks. Not following the protocols. This has been the case for months.”
These six people have tested positive for coronavirus since they were in the White House Rose Garden for last Saturday’s announcement of Judge Amy Coney Barrett for the U.S. Supreme Court. Let’s hope they all have a speedy recovery. pic.twitter.com/Qqe1rnRU0J
— Wolf Blitzer (@wolfblitzer) October 3, 2020
Even with the news that Hicks had tested positive, Trump continued to deliver cheerful predictions about the pandemic. On Thursday night, in remarks recorded earlier, he virtually addressed the Al Smith dinner, a Catholic fundraiser in New York, declaring: “I just want to say that the end of the pandemic is in sight and next year will be one of the greatest in the history of our country.”
Yet at 12.54am that night, Trump tweeted that he and Melania had tested positive. By Friday, his Twitter feed had gone unusually quiet and news of other positive tests from across the administration was spreading through an alarmed West Wing. “It’s absolute chaos,” texted one official.
Tonight, @FLOTUS and I tested positive for COVID-19. We will begin our quarantine and recovery process immediately. We will get through this TOGETHER!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 2, 2020
There is confusion over when Trump was actually tested positive. The president’s doctor, Sean Conley, yesterday (Saturday) referred to being “72 hours into the diagnosis”, which would mean he was tested on Wednesday night, raising the possibility that he carried on with his appointments until he fell ill. A White House official later claimed that Conley misspoke.
For Troye, the White House outbreak reflects a culture of denial that flowed down “from the very top”, in which political priorities and wishful thinking took precedence over scientific advice.
“It’s like people in the White House were living inside an alternate reality. The medical experts would tell you the data and the science and it was very frustrating then to have people roll their eyes, to hear the jokes that were happening. It’s not a funny thing,” she said.
“Some people never thought it was any worse than the flu, they thought it was overhyped. I’m sure these people are doing some soul-searching today (Sunday).”
With Trump cooped up in hospital for a minimum of several days, the political ramifications of his illness are still unfolding, throwing the presidential race into disarray.
Doctors, Nurses and ALL at the GREAT Walter Reed Medical Center, and others from likewise incredible institutions who have joined them, are AMAZING!!!Tremendous progress has been made over the last 6 months in fighting this PLAGUE. With their help, I am feeling well!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 3, 2020
When Boris Johnson became seriously ill with the coronavirus, Trump was deeply concerned about the British prime minister. “I know that it bothered him,” said Troye. “I’m sure in the back of his head somewhere he was thinking, ‘That could be me.’” Her hope is that the events of the past week serve as a belated alarm bell for the administration.
Trump, for his part, sounded positive. “Doctors, Nurses and ALL at the GREAT Walter Reed Medical Centre ... Amazing!!!,” he tweeted yesterday (Saturday). “Tremendous progress has been made over the last 6 months in fighting this PLAGUE. With their help I am feeling well!”
The Times
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