“If you have the whole West Wing running around wearing masks, it wasn’t a good look,” one administration official recalled of the directive that came down from senior staff and lawyers.
The West Wing wanted to “portray confidence and make the public believe there was absolutely nothing to worry about,” the official said, revealing the image-conscious reason for the opposition to masks for the first time.
The directive opened a schism in the White House complex that would ultimately hinder its ability to contain the spread of the new virus they were now calling Covid-19. Interviews with more than a dozen current and former administration officials show how that fissure appeared and spread even as confirmed cases in the US began to grow.
The ensuing disaster has now claimed the lives of more than 200,000 Americans in what may be the most politicized health crisis of the modern presidency. The radical polarization that now grips the country traces back to the very first workplace where it really sank in, at the West Wing of the White House.
White House spokeswoman Sarah Matthews, addressing questions about this story, said that the President “took the virus seriously from the beginning, as evidenced by his administration taking early steps in January to protect the American people.” It was Democrats and the media, she says, who were obsessing at the time — “over the partisan and futile impeachment trial.”
But several key officials tell a consistent and different story, about image management and the trouble it caused in pandemic response from the very beginning.
“We lost so much time,” a former administration official said, looking back. “The whole thing was mind-blowing. This could have been so different.”
All about optics
From the outset, the President’s political advisers were clearly thinking about optics. Almost from the beginning of the pandemic, their strategy was to cast the US infection rate in as favorable a light as possible — by comparing it to the rate in China, where the virus was born and already spreading wildly, several officials said.
“The numbers mattered, from a political standpoint, because it just looks better,” one former official recalled.
Information concerning the virus first appeared in the President’s daily intelligence briefing on January 3, but officials said it wasn’t clear how closely he read the briefing. No immediate action was taken, they said.
On January 6, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a Level 1 travel notice for Wuhan, amid fears that the virus was spreading beyond its origin.
The first-known case of coronavirus in the US was confirmed on January 20, but in the weeks prior to that revelation, the administration’s China watchers had already been paying close attention to the evolving situation, and worried that proactive measures needed to be taken in order to ensure it never made its way to the US, several officials said.
Yet when it came to announcing a big step forward in Trump’s trade deal with China, a visit from Chinese government officials was deemed by the White House as far too important to let concerns over the virus get in the way.
Three people told CNN that none of the Chinese delegates who attended the January 15 signing ceremony were tested before their arrival at the White House, nor do they believe that the topic of coronavirus was broached with the visiting delegation.
More than 200 people were invited to the White House that day to witness the signing, including members of the Cabinet and American business leaders. The show went on, and coronavirus was an afterthought. Crammed into the East Room,…
Read More: White House fight over masks signaled Covid-19 plans running awry