Donald Trump’s wife, Melania, was reportedly so disturbed by her husband’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic that she took to characterising his response as “screwing up”.
The news of one of the former president’s closest confidants, among others, expressing doubts in his ability to handle critical geopolitical issues comes from a forthcoming book from New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker and New Yorker staff writer and CNN global affairs analyst Susan Glasser. CNN obtained an early copy of the book.
In one of the book’s more damning passages, the pair of veteran reporters cite interviews with Trump insiders who were able to confirm that the one-term president’s partner was concerned with how his administration was responding to the pandemic, which he was claiming as late as 27 February – after the US had retroactively confirmed its first death and the World Health Organisation had declared it a global health emergency – would disappear “like a miracle”.
According to the authors, Ms Trump made the remarks about her husband during a phone call with one of her husband’s initial backers, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.
The former first lady had reportedly reached out to the Trump ally, who was at one point tapped to be head of Trump’s White House transition team but was later replaced by vice-president Mike Pence, to get his support in convincing the then-president to take the pandemic that was shutting down borders and converting hockey rinks to makeshift morgues more seriously.
“‘You’re blowing this,’ she recalled telling her husband,” the authors write in the book, due out on Tuesday.
“‘This is serious. It’s going to be really bad, and you need to take it more seriously than you’re taking it.’ He had just dismissed her. ‘You worry too much,’ she remembered him saying. ‘Forget it.’”
The book, aptly titled The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, lays bare significant inside details from the former president’s White House and reveals the shaky foundation that Mr Trump was making some of his most headline-grabbing decisions on.
In one of the passages, CNN reported, the then-director of national intelligence revealed deep misgivings to his associates about the sitting president after Mr Trump took a now-infamous meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2018.
During that meeting in Helsinki, Mr Trump took the side of his Russia counterpart over US intelligence officials who had determined that Moscow had tried to interfere in the 2016 election.
“President Putin says it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be,” he said to reporters after the pair of world leaders had held a behind-closed-doors meeting for two hours in the Finnish capital.
This comment, according to the book, left top intelligence in his White House baffled and left wondering what the man sitting in the Oval Office’s real motives might be.
“I never could come to a conclusion. It raised the question in everybody’s mind: What does Putin have on him that causes him to do something that undermines his credibility?” reflected Dan Coats, the then-director of national intelligence, to associates after the Helsinki meeting, according to the book.
Mr Trump was roundly criticised for his administration’s slow response to the Covid-19 pandemic, which was plagued initially by the president’s wishful thinking and side-lining of public health experts, and later side-tracked by his tendency to focus on pinning the blame for the country’s rising death count on other countries policies.
“Look, we’re going to lose anywhere from 75, 80 to 100 thousand people. That’s a horrible thing. We shouldn’t lose one person over this,” the then-president said during a town hall on 3 May, before shifting the blame onto China, where the virus was first detected.
“This should have been stopped in China. It should have been stopped. But if we didn’t do it, the minimum we would have lost is a million-two, a million-four, a million-five. That’s the minimum. We would have lost probably higher than — it’s possible higher than 2.2.”
On the day before President Joe Biden’s inauguration, Mr Trump’s last day in office and about 10 months after most of the country went into lockdown, the US had climbed to 400,000 deaths.
On Tuesday, the last full day of Mr Trump’s presidency, the death toll reached 400,000 — a once-unthinkable number. More than 100,000 Americans have perished in the pandemic in just the past five weeks.
And since the first death was recorded in February 2020, more than a million more lives have been claimed by the virus that the former president predicted in April 2020 would likely only kill 50,000 to 60,000.
The book is due out on shelves on Tuesday 20 September.
