On Saturday, the day after President Trump was admitted to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center with symptoms of COVID-19, the country remained in a state of confusion about his medical status. The White House physician, Sean P. Conley, spoke briefly to reporters outside Walter Reed but did not disclose Trump’s temperature or whether he had been given supplemental oxygen. (The Times and the Associated Press are reporting that, according to their sources, Trump was given supplemental oxygen at the White House on Friday.) Conley also gave a time line of Trump’s illness that suggested the President tested positive on Wednesday, before he attended a campaign event in Minneapolis and another at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. (After the press conference, Conley released a statement saying that he had misspoken, and that Trump was first diagnosed on Thursday evening.)
Conley said that Trump is “doing very well,” but White House reporters painted a more concerning portrait of his condition. After Conley spoke, a person familiar with Trump’s health told reporters, “The President’s vitals over the last twenty-four hours were concerning, and the next forty-eight hours will be critical in terms of his care. We’re still not on a clear path to full recovery.”
Shortly after the press conference, I spoke by phone with Maggie Haberman, a Times White House correspondent. Since early Friday morning, when the White House announced Trump’s diagnosis, Haberman’s byline has appeared on more than twenty stories. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what we know about when Trump first tested positive, how the President has been trying to control the narrative around his illness, and the level of coronavirus denial among Republicans in Washington.
What have you been able to learn about the timing of the President’s positive diagnosis?
Conley raised far more questions than he answered. I have reported that [Trump] was on oxygen at the White House. Conley seemed to give very equivocal answers around that, and what happened. The biggest question mark for me is Conley saying we are seventy-two hours into this diagnosis. If we are seventy-two hours into it, that suggests he has been sick since Wednesday, and that is a major question, because if he was sick on Wednesday, and they had him going to a rally in Minnesota, and then a fund-raiser, parts of which were in an indoor area at his club in Bedminster, that is important to know.
What have you been able to learn about the President’s state of mind?
His friend Stanley Chera, who was a real-estate magnate in New York, died [of the coronavirus, in April]. Chera was older than Trump is and was in worse physical shape than Trump is, and Chera got very, very sick, very quickly, and basically went into the hospital and never came out. Trump was very spooked by that, and I think that has stayed with him. And he is—I don’t want to say hypochondriacal, because that is not the right word—but he gets very agitated when he is not feeling great. And I think all of this contributed to how they were dealing with him [on Friday].
What do you mean by that?
What I mean by that is that some people experience the feeling of being sick differently than others, and I think he experiences it acutely, and it can be anxiety-provoking.
I thought you might have been implying that, because of how he deals with sickness—
Oh, I just think there were various reasons for taking him to Walter Reed, and that was one of them.
How would you define the attitude, broadly speaking, of people in and around the White House before the past few days regarding the dangers of the virus?
I think that the response to the virus and how to treat it and deal with it has been very top-down for a very long time. I think the President has tried willing it away for a very long time. In the last hour or so, we have learned that [the former New Jersey governor] Chris Christie tested positive, and he was at that event on Saturday that appears to have been something of a nexus point for people getting sick, and ironically, Christie was one of the people who wrote an op-ed to the President early on saying, “Look, take this seriously.” As time has gone on, Trump has tried to downplay it, and he admitted to [the Washington Post journalist] Bob Woodward he was trying to downplay it. The problem is that there is a midway point between saying “I don’t want people to panic, don’t freak out, we can handle this,” and, you know, not taking basic precautions and making fun of states for taking basic precautions and making fun of people for wearing masks, and the President, to varying degrees, did all of that.
When you see these videos of people in the Rose Garden for the Amy Coney Barrett event [announcing her nomination to the Supreme Court] hugging and not wearing masks, and seemingly unconcerned about their own health, it is obviously partly about the messages Trump sends, but how concerned are Republicans in Washington generally? I was sort of surprised by it.
I think this is requiring a level of putting people on the couch that is a little difficult, but look, we have seen Republicans try to focus on a different theme, which is not the virus, and the virus is the thing a majority of the people in the country are talking about. I am not really surprised. I am surprised you are surprised, because this has been going on for months.
I have seen other videos of Republican politicians behaving this way, but I suppose in the back of my mind somewhere I thought, Well, at some deeper level, they know this is dangerous and these people will at least be careful with their own lives.
Look, there were events in March that raised questions about whether people would get sick, and that didn’t happen. There was one in Mar-a-Lago. People didn’t get sick then, and it created this unreality bubble. And it popped.
How did you first hear the news?
You are asking me to cast my mind back that far? Which part in particular?
That he tested positive.
I heard it at 1 A.M., when they tweeted out a doctor’s note, but we knew for several hours that we were likely to get an answer that evening about what his condition was, because this came up after [the senior Trump campaign adviser] Hope Hicks tested positive, which the White House had tried keeping secret. Isaac, it is really important for voters to drill down on the question of the seventy-two hours, because if that wasn’t true, not only were they letting him do events, but they weren’t telling the public, and it raises questions about what they would have told the public if we hadn’t found out about Hope Hicks.
Are people talking to you now for the reasons people usually talk to you, or for different reasons?
People at the White House are incredibly anxious.
For their own safety? For the country? For what?
For their own safety. For the safety of the country. I think they are scared for the President. I do want to make the point that all of us hope the President gets better, and all of us are sorry to see people sick, and this is a large number of people dealing with an ugly virus, and so I hope he and the First Lady make a full recovery. So do his staff. And I think his staff also don’t want to get sick. And I think they are just shell-shocked. But also, you have to remember that, at least for them, he is this omnipotent figure and force around them, and the driving force of everything. And to have him not present is jarring for them.
What do you mean by “omnipotent”? In a way another President might not be?
Yeah, remember, this is a President who literally makes everything about him in a way that previous Presidents have not. I just think it’s different.
How do you normally answer the question of why people talk to you, and how might that change now?
It doesn’t change. It really doesn’t. The reason that people talked about the White House and told me stuff over the past four years is some combination of information they thought should be public, their own confusion about what they were seeing, and so forth, and I think that is just as true now.
Has anything surprised you about the last seventy-two hours? Are you taken aback by anything?
I am not taken aback by the lack of information. I am frustrated by the lack of information. If, indeed, they were sending him out to events knowing he was sick—and we don’t know that, and we need to clarify this—I really will be taken aback. [Laughs.] And I was taken aback by hearing Conley say it. But, in general, I have just been very frustrated by the lack of information, which, in fairness to Mark Meadows, the chief of staff, is being really heavily driven by the President.
So despite whatever state he is in, you are certain he is still giving orders to people about what is going to be released publicly.
A hundred per cent. He is very, very reluctant to have information about his health out there. He always has been. And anything that makes him seem weak. This is his worst nightmare. Not just getting sick with this, but any scenario where he is out of sight and being tended to and Joe Biden is out campaigning.
Worst scenario in terms of polling and election results or a deeper psychological thing?
Both. Any perception of weakness for him is some kind of psychic wound.
How is the rest of the First Family responding?
I think the Trump kids are very, very anxious. They are a family, and it’s hard to know what a family is like when you are not inside it, but I think they are a family that is more interwoven than a lot of families I know. And I think, for them, having him be sick is very alarming.