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THIS WAS ONE OF those days when developments necessitated a second briefing. The morning briefing was in Buffalo. I talked about how our curve was starting to plateau, although we were seeing variations region by region across the state. New York City, one of the densest cities on the globe, had one infection rate. Upstate, where many of the counties are rural, had different infection rates. Each region had its own need for testing. Watching the news with my daughters the previous night, I saw that Governor Larry Hogan of Maryland had purchased test kits from South Korea, and one of my kids turned to me and said, “Why didn’t you think of that, Dad?” While I did momentarily feel chastened, it wasn’t realistic or productive for fifty governors to go scrounging for testing all over the globe. Once again, I called on the federal government for help with the supplies we needed to get the testing done.
The president was telling his people to slow down testing because he didn’t like the higher numbers of positive cases. If you reduce testing, he figured, the number of reported cases went down, and then you can reopen. It was a child’s logic and the continuation of his policy of denial. He just wanted the good press of the economy coming back from reopening; he didn’t care about the virus. He was constructing his political narrative that COVID was a Democratic problem and was not a problem for the Republican states. A few weeks later, Ron DeSantis of Florida would give a press conference with Mike Pence at his side affirming this narrative. He demanded an apology from the media for fearmongering, because his state of Florida was doing fine on COVID. (And in late July, Vanity Fair would publish an article saying that the White House believed there was no need for a national testing effort because they could just blame blue-state governors for their own problems. Also in late July, Florida’s infection rate was exploding, then at nearly half a million confirmed COVID cases, with no end in sight.)
After the briefing that morning, I would head to the White House to make the case for why they should be doing more to help New York meet our testing goal. Up until that point, the president had demonstrated little interest in helping the states ramp up testing capacity, but I knew they controlled the supply chain and we couldn’t get what we needed without them. It was a long shot, but life is options and I didn’t have any. Melissa was opposed to the trip. She was convinced that the only reason they had agreed to the meeting—conspicuously scheduled for 4:00 P.M., an hour before when the president normally conducted his press conference—was to corner me into appearing at the president’s daily briefing, and that we would return with nothing but a positive political press hit for the White House along with a promise for help that would never be fulfilled.
Nevertheless, I flew down with Jim Malatras and Gareth Rhodes for the meeting with Jared Kushner; Admiral Brett Giroir from HHS, who was their testing czar; Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator; and others to discuss how the states and the federal government could work together on testing. We showed up with a PowerPoint presentation complete with actual quotes from our labs, such as “We could run at full capacity but we don’t have reagents.” Boom, boom, boom, one slide after another.
Birx oversees a task force at Walter Reed that allocates the national manufacturers’ reagents to the states, and as a result of that meeting, she opened up the allocation to us. Afterward, I was brought to the Oval Office to meet with the president. I said that we had a good meeting on testing and that I would advocate with other governors for the state-federal partnership that we had discussed. (I had also served as the vice chairman of the National Governors Association and in that capacity had dealt with both Democratic and Republican governors.)
The president, as usual, just wanted positive public relations about his COVID response. We were joined in the Oval Office by Hope Hicks, who was setting up the president’s COVID press briefing later that afternoon. And sure enough, as Melissa had predicted, during the meeting they asked me if I would join Trump at his press briefing to communicate how the federal government was helping on testing. The president also reiterated his claim that hydroxychloroquine was going to be the silver bullet and pushed again to accelerate the New York hospitals’ testing of the drugs. Also in the Oval Office was Dan Scavino, who was the president’s social media and Twitter maven. I asked Scavino whose idea it was to continually lambaste me in the president’s tweets. I never got a clear answer. Jim Malatras would later say he felt the Oval Office visit was like going onto a TV set and playing a part, after which they would move on to the next scene. I had seen how the president had run the video using the positive statements I had made about him, and I was not going to be in the same situation twice. I politely demurred from joining the briefing. I restated my position that I would call it straight and when the federal government fulfilled its role I would say so, and if he abandoned his role I would say that also. For good measure, I also brought the president a bottle
