The Chief’s Chief is the most consequential book on the Trump presidency. In his memoir, Mark Meadows confesses to possibly putting Joe Biden’s life in jeopardy and then covering it up – all in easily digested prose and an unadorned voice. If nothing else, the book has provided plenty of ammunition for Donald Trump to have concluded that Meadows “betrayed” him.
Trump has trashed The Chief’s Chief as “fake news”, derided Meadows as “fucking stupid”, and falsely claimed that the book “confirmed” that he “did not have Covid before or during the debate”.
Actually, when it comes to events in Cleveland on 29 September 2020, Meadows writes: “We’ll probably never know whether President Trump was positive that evening.” But we know he very well might have been.
And to think Trump gave Meadows a blurb for his cover: “We will have a big future together”. Hopefully, Meadows received at least 30 pieces of silver as an advance.
By the numbers, Trump came in contact with approximately 500 people between the time he received his first positive test, which was followed by a negative one, and his announcement that he did indeed have Covid. Not surprisingly, Trump blamed others for giving him the virus, even intimating that gold star military families did it.
Last week, after the Guardian broke news of Meadows’ book, Michael Shear of the New York Times recalled: “Hours after he received the call from Meadows informing him of a positive test, Trump came to the back of AF1 without a mask and talked with reporters for about 10 minutes.”
“Several days later”, Shear himself tested positive.
The 45th president looks like “patient zero”, a one-man super-spreader.
Switching topics, Meadows tags Biden for getting overly handsy and says Andrew Cuomo ogled Hope Hicks. Unsurprisingly, Meadows omits mention of allegations against his own boss. Just one example? E Jean Carroll’s defamation lawsuit against Trump, arising from an alleged rape in a department store dressing room.
Turning to Republican politics, Meadows, a former North Carolina congressman, accuses John Boehner, once House Speaker, of acting like a “Mafia Don”. Again, Meadows does not mention the boss’s behavior.
As reported by Joshua Green in Devil’s Bargain, Trump once laced into Paul Manafort, his sometime campaign manager, thus: “You treat me like a baby! Am I like a baby to you … Am I a fucking baby, Paul?”
Manafort was convicted on bank and tax charges in 2018. But he stayed a loyal foot soldier and received a pardon from Trump.
With Christmas just weeks away, Meadows throws in the following Trump quote as a holiday bonus: “I’m the only one who can save us.”
Meadows isn’t the sole Trump administration alum doing his darnedest to portray their guy as America’s saviour. But he is the only one who lets us know Trump tested positive before he tested negative. And that makes his book one for the ages.
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Other would-be stocking stuffers by Trump insiders convey that they were either in the dark about that fateful Covid test or took care not to share. Kayleigh McEnany, Trump’s final press secretary; Peter Navarro, an economics adviser; and Scott Atlas, a Covid adviser, are out with books of their own.
In her non-tell-all, McEnany makes sure we know of her academic credentials and reiterates her claim that she never lied to reporters. After all, she writes, her education at “Oxford, Harvard and Georgetown” meant she always relied on “truthful, well-sourced, well-researched information”.
She doesn’t mention her time at the University of Miami much. But no matter. Elite degrees say more about future earnings and marriage prospects than a penchant for truth. Trump attended the University of Pennsylvania. Boris Johnson, Oxford. Richard Nixon went to Duke and Bill Clinton is a graduate of Yale.
Nixon was disbarred, Clinton’s law license suspended. Boris is Boris.
McEnany thanks the deity repeatedly. Her title, For Such a Time as This, riffs off the Book of Esther. She stays on message for more than 200 pages, lauding Trump for standing for “faith, conservatism and freedom”. But that first positive Covid test, on 26 September, described by Meadows and since confirmed by Maggie Haberman and other pillars of the Washington press? Nada.
McEnany writes that on 1 October 2020, two days after the Trump-Biden debate, she learned for the first time that Trump and Melania had “tested positive for Covid-19”. On 2 October, Trump was helicoptered to hospital. On 5 October, McEnany was told she had the virus too. She does not draw a line to Trump’s recklessness.
“Thankfully,” she writes, “everyone in the White House made a full and complete recovery, including me.”
Not true. McEnany does not mention Crede Bailey, head of the White House security office. When she was Trump’s press secretary, she did.
Asked about Bailey at a briefing, McEnany said: “Our heart goes out to his family. They have asked for privacy. And he is recovering, from what I understand. We are very pleased to see that. But he and his family will be in our prayers.”
On a GoFundMe page set up to help pay for Bailey’s treatment, a friend wrote: “Crede beat Covid-19 but it came at a significant cost: his big toe on his left foot as well as his right foot and lower leg had to be amputated.” Bailey also suffered long-term lung, heart, liver and kidney damage. According to his family, Trump has never publicly acknowledged Bailey’s “illness”.
McEnany delivers a bouquet to Meadows.
“You were a constant reminder of faith,” she gushes. “Thank you for being an inspiring leader for the entire West Wing.”
Navarro would probably disagree. In fact, it’s a good bet he would concur with Trump’s new assessment of Meadows’ intelligence.
In his book, In Trump Time, Navarro repeatedly takes Meadows to task for insufficient loyalty and accessibility. According to Navarro, after Trump lost to Biden, the White House chief of staff’s heart and body were too often not at the White House.
“Wherever the heck” Meadows was, Navarro says, he sounded “like Napoleon after Waterloo, getting ready to be shipped out to Elba”.
Navarro also blames Meadows for failing to heed a purported warning in 2019 from Cleta Mitchell, a Republican activist and lawyer, that the Democrats “were getting ready to steal the election”. When Meadows was pressed in September 2020 about his failure to act on this tip, Navarro says, all he could muster was, “It just didn’t happen.”
The fact that both the House and Senate have documented Meadows’ efforts to put the squeeze on Republican election officials fails to impress Navarro.
The Chief’s Chief may have also waived Meadows’ claim of executive privilege. Either way, Meadows’s latest about-face on cooperating with the House select committee investigating the events of 6 January is unlikely to alter Navarro’s impression of him.
As for Mitchell, she resigned from her law firm over her role in an infamous call between Trump and Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state.
On top of pushing the line that the Democrats stole the election, Navarro lambasts numerous officials for failing to confront China, Mike Pence among them. Significantly, as he goes after Trump’s star-crossed vice-president, Navarro sounds a now-familiar trope of the anti-democratic right.
He brands Pence a treacherous “Brutus” who betrayed Trump, an “American Caesar”. Did Navarro forget those gallows bearing Pence’s name? Regardless, the shoutout to a murdered Roman emperor is meant as a full-throated compliment.
During the 2016 campaign, Paul LePage, then governor of Maine, thought Trump needed to show some “authoritarian power”. Last May, Michael Anton of the rightwing Claremont Institute pondered whether the US needed a caesar. Anton was joined on air by Curtis Yarvin, AKA Mencius Moldbug, a self-described monarchist and pillar of the Dark Enlightenment, a take embraced by the alt-right.
Navarro demands “full forensic audits” of the 2020 election and posits that the 6 January insurrection may have been “perpetrated by those who sought to provoke an attack on our Capitol as a means of derailing” a Trump electoral college win.
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In A Plague Upon Our House, Scott Atlas goes after Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci for grabbing headlines but ignores both Trump’s prediction that Covid, “one day – it’s like a miracle – it will disappear” and his admission to Bob Woodward that Covid would be worse than he told the public.
Covid has killed nearly 800,000 Americans – and counting. The US faces another Covid winter, with more than 100,000 new cases daily and the Omicron variant looming. Vaccine resistance and Covid deaths have become red-state hallmarks.
Atlas is a radiologist and a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He joined the Trump White House in August 2020 and resigned after the election.
As a Covid adviser he opposed expanded testing and isolation, calling such measures “grossly misguided”. Rather, he argued that the virus could be stymied and herd immunity attained once 20% to 25% of the population contracted it. In his book, he appears to discount the impact of long Covid.
Confronted by an open letter from Stanford faculty challenging his credentials, Atlas threatened legal retaliation. Marc Kasowitz, Trump’s lawyer, demanded immediate retraction. None followed.
Atlas, however, did get one big thing right: opposing school closures, which he characterized as an “egregious and inexplicable” policy failure. Closures helped cost the Democrats Virginia. Glenn Youngkin’s win in that race for governor was about more than critical race theory.
Trump and Trumpism will remain a force in the Republican party in the years to come. Meadows, McEnaney, Navarro and Atlas are counting on it.
Earlier this month, however, Chris Christie spoke at a dinner of DC poohbahs.
“I gave Donald Trump my undying loyalty,” he said. “And as we learned this week, he definitely gave me Covid.”
Just a reminder, folks.
