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Instead of a smile-and-wave final White House chapter, the couple are busy trying to keep the President from saying too little or too much, throwing themselves on a grenade they aren't certain will detonate but not able to take the chance either way.

From her office in the West Wing, Ivanka Trump was fielding calls from Capitol Hill politicians who were literally hiding from a vicious and violent mob. Sen. Lindsey Graham, a ubiquitous presence with the President during golf outings and holiday jaunts to Mar-a-Lago, could not get in touch with Trump to beseech him to publicly call for a stop to the insurrection, a source familiar with the conversation told CNN. So Graham called Ivanka Trump, pleading for her to help talk to her dad.

Ivanka Trump was among those who pushed her father to make the Twitter video that ultimately got him banned in the wake of the riot,

It was again Ivanka Trump key among the aides who pushed the President to issue a subsequent video in the wake of his impeachment, again denouncing any future violence or plots to wreak havoc across the country. There were no words of "love" this time.

"They're trying to keep what little is left for them in terms of sellable currency as Trumps," said one source, who added the change from "before insurrection" to "after insurrection" has moved the needle on the state of the Trump empire from perilous to dire.

In December, Trump and Kushner closed on the purchase of a $30 million plot of land on exclusive Indian Creek Island just north of Miami, with plans, friends say, to build a private estate. Murmurs that Trump wants to challenge Florida's GOP Sen. Marco Rubio for his seat in 2022 are growing -- or at least they were before the insurrection.

"The idea that anyone will forget that her father incited these attacks is about zero," said one political operative who has worked in Republican politics. "If she wanted future voters to overlook just how devastating the end of this administration is, that's a big lift."

"The proof here about how worried (the family) is is how quiet they are," said another source, who notes the muzzled Twitter screeds and the dialed-back bravado, most notably of Ivanka Trump's brothers Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump.

"Until there's real evidence that the Trump brand is diminished with the activist base and dominant MAGA wing of the party, and not merely among elected Republicans and establishment types, I think Ivanka would remain the clear front-runner against Marco Rubio," he said.

The Kushner-Trumps also have a cottage at Trump Bedminster Golf Club in New Jersey, which was recently renovated to add more bedrooms. It's possible they could land there for some amount of time, but politically New Jersey is not Trump country, either.

The most fractured of the bonds is likely the tenuous friendship Trump previously had with her stepmother, Melania Trump. The two women are undoubtedly the most powerful and influential in the President's life, and prior to the White House years both were aware and respectful of one another's turf, according to sources familiar with the dynamic. However, Ivanka Trump's perceived incursions into first lady Melania Trump's lane have led to tension between the women that's so bad, one source told CNN, there is little desire by either to be in the same room.

In recent months, Ivanka Trump and Melania Trump have not, in fact, been publicly photographed together, with the exception of the presidential debate in September and the Republican National Convention in August

At Thanksgiving, Ivanka Trump and the adult siblings went to Camp David, while Trump ate dinner at the White House with Melania Trump, Barron Trump and her parents. Over the Christmas holiday, Ivanka Trump and Kushner did not visit Mar-a-Lago as they had in years past. Though Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner have separate living space at Mar-a-Lago, where the outgoing first couple intends to live post-White House, one source said Melania Trump "hasn't exactly rolled out the welcome mat."

But if there were ever a time for the Trump family to get on with its bunker mentality and try for an image upgrade, it would be now -- or the hotels, real estate, branded retail and any future Trump-touched business entities could be irretrievably damaged. "I think this is one time the family has to acknowledge that their actions have had consequences," the source said.

She’s also a woman who sells this image strategically. The white working-class Americans to whom Ms. Trump’s father directed many of his appeals hew more closely to traditional views of marital obligations and gender norms than those who are college educated, even as most working-class mothers are employed outside the home and are more likely to be raising children on their own.

Women expecting egalitarianism at home often feel hoodwinked by this new subtly sexist arrangement. Women expecting traditionalism find they’re stretched too thin by a belief that they should be the primary parent and an economic reality that demands their employment.

Women who maintain demanding careers and also believe they are chiefly responsible for managing the domestic front are much more stressed out than women whose partners share in both work and family duties, according to social science research. For white working-class families, where women often work out of necessity and who also believe in the importance of divergent responsibilities for men and women, that dissonance sows significant marital conflict.Least feminist of all: The “women who work” discourse adopted by Ms. Trump frames this all as a woman’s choice, rather than the predictable and deliberate outcome when feminist gains are warped by conservative public policy.

Murdoch and Trump have known each other for years on the New York scene, but what started out as a reportedly slightly chilly relationship has warmed considerably in recent years. As recently as April, the two were said to be talking “almost every day” (the White House has denied this). Murdoch’s Fox News played a crucial cheerleading role in Trump’s election and before that, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump were known to go on double-dates with Murdoch and his ex-wife Wendi Deng, the two women remaining close even after Murdoch split with Deng. Throughout the campaign, Ivanka was a trustee of the $300m fortune allocated to Murdoch’s daughters with Deng, stepping down only after the financial connection became public.

the full transcript revealed a number of lines embarrassing for Trump that the paper had ignored, from Trump’s inquiry about Scottish independence – “What would they do with the British Open if they ever got out? They’d no longer have the British Open” – to his claim that the head of the Boy Scouts had called him to say he had delivered “the greatest speech that was ever made to them” the day before. (The Boy Scouts denied that.)

By the time of the February town hall meeting in the WSJ newsroom, tensions were running high between Baker and his staff.

And they came to a head again this summer when Politico published a leaked transcript of an Oval Office interview Baker had carried out with Trump, after the Journal had printed a news piece and a partial transcript.

In early January 2017, Baker upped the ante, publicly expressing reluctance to accuse Trump of “lying” amid a bout of national media soul-searching over how to cover the incoming president’s false statements, and lashing out at critics in a column mocking a “fit of Trump-induced pearl-clutching among the journalistic elite”. “If we are to use the term ‘lie’ in our reporting, then we have to be confident about the subject’s state of knowledge and his moral intent,” Baker explained of his approach.

By adhering to the conservative worldview – newly supercharged by Trump – that all media skews liberal, Baker just may have helped the Journal straddle the divide between readers who want their information from a trustworthy outlet and those typically skeptical of journalism as an institution.

Last month, another series of emails were leaked, to the Journal’s top competitor, the New York Times. In them, Baker again chastised his staff for the language they used to describe Trump, in this case in coverage of the president’s erratic rally in Phoenix, Arizona, at the height of controversy over his remarks equating neo-Nazis with protesters opposing them. “Sorry. This is commentary dressed up as news reporting,” Baker wrote in a late-night email to staff about the draft story. “Could we please just stick to reporting what he said rather than packaging it in exegesis and selective criticism?

On Wednesday night last week, a staffer contacted the Guardian about the latest obfuscating clause included in a Journal story on the debt ceiling that day. In it, Trump was described as having “condemned white supremacists in Charlottesville”, obscuring the fact that his last word on the subject was rather the opposite. “I almost threw up,” the staffer told the Guardian of reading the story.

The full transcript also showed that the Journal’s White House reporters were sidelined during the interview by Baker, who dominated the questioning, speaking familiarly with Ivanka Trump about their children and a party they had both attended in the Hamptons in New York.

But many staffers aren’t satisfied to be the best media voice in the Trump echo chamber, given the Journal’s history as one of the top papers in the country, with 16 newsroom Pulitzer prizes under pre-Murdoch editor Paul Steiger between 1991 and 2007 (only one more has been added in the Murdoch era).

Carr noted that Baker, as early as 2010, when he was deputy managing editor, was already seen as pushing the WSJ into “adopting a more conservative tone, and editing and headlining articles to reflect a chronic skepticism of the [Obama] administration”.

“It really came to a head after the election,” a recent Journal departee told the Guardian. “The election was on Tuesday and it wasn’t until Monday or Tuesday of the next week that the Journal wrote a single story about the legitimate anxiety that Trump’s win had provoked within large sections of the population.”

the Journal is not competing with the Post and the Times for scoops and talent the way they have in earlier eras.

In November, Poynter reported that 48 Journal employees had accepted buyouts – a trend seen across the media industry. In the months that followed, more staffers opted for the door. The departures include two top White House reporters, well-respected political and policy reporters, veteran foreign correspondents, and virtually the entire national security team, some of whom were poached by the Washington Post.

Baker’s influence is often not direct, current and former employees say. Instead, his preferences are internalized by reporters who avoid pitching stories they expect he won’t like or who tone down language in their copy before turning it in.

“The main way he influenced the coverage in a political way was not by saying you can’t write about X subject,” one former staffer said. “It was more that there were certain stories that could get into the paper very easily and other stories you knew would be a fight.”

Others said reporters, in the DC bureau especially, have had to fight to get their harder-hitting Trump stories published, if they get published at all. “Almost everyone in the newsroom has a story about their story or a story of a colleague’s getting killed,” said a reporter. “That happens in all newspapers, but the killings run in one direction.

Murdoch appeared to recognise there was an opportunity for a major publication outside of the coastal media bubble, just as he saw the opportunity for a right-leaning cable channel when he launched Fox News in the 1990s.

But the difficulty for the Journal is its owner’s close relationship with the president. This year Murdoch, long adept at cultivating relationships with powerful conservatives, has become closer than ever to the White House, according to some accounts, speaking almost every day.

One staffer added: “Words have consequences and Gerry’s terrible handling of things like why we don’t call lies ‘lies’ had a chilling effect.”

And Martin Peers, who was head of the Journal’s media and marketing bureau from 2011 until 2014, recalls being pressured to go soft when covering Murdoch’s company and tough on rivals. “It was really striking how any time we were writing something about News Corp they would go over it very carefully,” he told the Guardian. “With the New York Times they’d say we weren’t being hard enough on them.”

And as repeated leaks from the newsroom have made clear, top editors have continued to pull reporters back from writing which was too critical of Trump – and there’s hardly an infraction too minor. Recently, a reporter in the Washington bureau was chided by an editor for a tweet regarding Trump’s effects on the stock market, which was deemed to be too sharp on Trump, according to a colleague.

“The whole culture of the Journal for decades has been to be fair and accurate but also convey analysis and perspective and meaning,” another ex-Journal person said. “Gerry’s saying ‘just report the facts’, but there’s a difference between journalism and stenography.”

Ivanka Trump, who previously contributed to Hillary Clinton and John McCain in 2007 and 2008 respectively, does not appear to have given to her father.

t. Gen. Michael Flynn, the former Defense Intelligence Agency director turned Trump warm-up act, has not given the candidate a dime. Neither has Governor Chris Christie

Many of Trump’s surrogates, who have been generous in previous campaigns, this year have kept their wallets closed to The Donald.

Ben Carson, another staunch Trump defender, gave Mitt Romney $1,000 in April 2012 but nothing to Trump this cycle.

And contributions below $200 are not required to be reported by presidential campaigns.

The kind of anything goes rule when it comes to donations applies evenly to both candidates in the race and some of Clinton’s team is not on record providing contributions either.

However, Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta appears to have given $2,700 on April 16, 2015. And Chelsea Clinton gave her mother’s campaign $2,700 on Jan. 21, 2016. There are also documented contributions from newly-appointed Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile, Clinton’s campaign manager Robby Mook, and former strategist for President Obama David Axelrod.

One major Clinton surrogate who is noticeably absent from her extensive list of contributors is billionaire Mark Cuban who has been a public thorn in Trump’s side.

And by September, Trump had paid his own businesses around $8.2 million, comprised of rent, food, and facilities and payroll for corporate staffers. He even used tens of thousands of dollars in campaign donations to buy copies of his own book.

Meanwhile, Trump is still asserting that he will invest $100 million in his own campaign

In February 2017, less than a month into Trump's presidency, Conway responded to the news of retailers cutting ties with Ivanka Trump's clothing line by saying on Fox News, "Go buy Ivanka's stuff is what I would tell you. It's a wonderful line. I own some of it. I'm going to give a free commercial here. Go buy it today, everybody."

The New York-based Signature Bank announced that it would close down Trump’s personal accounts that have about $5.3 million due to the “displeasure and shock” management experienced following the Capitol riots. 

Earlier this week, Bloomberg News reported that Deutsche Bank would not conduct future business with Trump or his company besides monitoring the payment of existing loans amounting to more than $300 million. 

The deadly riots resulted in at least five deaths, including a Capitol Police officer and a woman shot by a plain clothes Capitol Police officer.

The New York bank also called on the president to resign and said it would not make future agreements with lawmakers who contested the Electoral College results after the riots.

“We witnessed the President of the United States encouraging the rioters and refraining from calling in the National Guard to protect the Congress in its performance of duty,” the statement continued.

Eric TrumpEric TrumpLet's make Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021 the day Trumpism died Ivanka Trump urges 'patriots' storming Capitol to 'stop immediately' in now-deleted tweet Eric Trump warns of primary challenges for Republicans who don't object to election results MORE, one of the president’s sons put in charge of day-to-day operations of the Trump Organization, told The Associated Press that banks and other companies ending their relationship with the business after the riots exemplifies a liberal “cancel culture.”

“If you disagree with them, if they don’t like you, they try and cancel you.”

Several companies, in addition to the banks, have distanced themselves from the president after last week’s events, including Shopify, which took down trumpstore.com, and PGA of America, which moved a 2022 championship away from Trump property.

New York City declared on Wednesday that it would end contracts with the Trump Organization to run attractions in the city’s park, with Mayor Bill de BlasioBill de BlasioRepublican Staten Island candidate apologizes for Hitler reference New York City considering ending business contracts with Trump Columnist Ross Barkan discusses the slow vaccination process in the state of New York MORE (D) saying, “New York City doesn’t do business with insurrectionists.”

Modi has courted the US administration by inviting Ivanka Trump to India, inviting Trump himself to an Indian-American "Howdy Modi" rally in Houston and, most spectacularly, ensuring the US president received the largest possible audience during his visit to India with events that included a 100,000-strong rally in Gujarat.

Senior Indian officials say relations between the leaders of major countries are driven overwhelmingly by national interests and only marginally by personalities. They point to Modi's excellent working relationship with Obama, whom Modi invited to be chief guest at India's Republic Day parade.

Modi is best known for his religion-infused nationalism, but he is also a fervent proponent of climate action andr has massively expanded his country's welfare programs.

If Biden wins, the Indian government can be expected to re-engage on climate issues, an easing of immigration restrictions and a resumption of less rancorous trade talks.

Democrats have criticized these policies as human rights abuses that are biased against Muslims; Indian officials argue that these are a misunderstanding of what the legislation sought to accomplish.

Indians, great admirers of the US and its technological capabilities, have been bewildered at how the nation has blundered its way through the pandemic.

When it became clear India's rickety healthcare system and unruly federal structure were failing to contain the virus, Modi agreed to impose one of the severest economic lockdowns in the world.

Trump, in turn, has compared the US's record on testing favorably to that of India's and claimed India and other countries are not giving proper counts of their Covid fatality numbers.

There is also considerable vicarious pride in the choice of an Indian-American, Sen. Kamala Harris, as Biden's running mate. One noticeable characteristic of the present campaign is the degree to which both candidates have gone to woo the Indian-American community. That the US is home to what is perceived by Indians as their most successful diaspora is just one more -- and arguably the most lasting -- reason that India and the US will remain close, irrespective of election results in either country.

Critics agreed that the president, sadly, not changed since taking office. Many suggested he had dragged down Washington and the country:

two themes that keep growing brighter — or maybe I should say darker — in Republican politics now.

One is the reflexive attempt to divert attention from the florid craziness in their own ranks and own base by screaming “communist,” “socialist” or “radical left.”

The other is to claim that they’re protecting freedom when they’re sanctioning nonsense.

How did Marco Rubio, emblematic of all the Republican senators who are determined to stay cozy with Trump’s supporters, respond to Trump’s richly earned second impeachment?

By saying that the “radical left” was out of control. Mind you, the radical right, bloated by Trump’s fictions and most Republican senators’ silence, orchestrated the deadly events of Jan. 6, but confronting that head-on is of no political use to Rubio. So, instead: socialism! Cancel culture! The radical left!

Many Republicans immediately accepted Greene’s speech on the House floor on Thursday — during which she disavowed QAnon and the idea that school massacres and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were hoaxes — as a redemptive apology. It was nothing of the kind.

Sensible firearms restrictions aren’t an insult to freedom. They’re a bulwark against bloodshed and chaos, protecting the freedom of high school students and others to go about their days without the constant, gnawing fear of being shot.

“I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true,” she said. Allowed to? No, ready to. Eager to. Itching with paranoia and hate, which she then spread.

Removing Representative Greene from her House committee assignments — which the House did on Thursday night by a 230-to-199 vote, with 11 Republicans joining 219 Democrats in favor of her ouster — wasn’t the death of free speech. Greene remains free, as an individual, to spout the bunk she once spouted

But Congress has the right — and, I’d argue, the responsibility — to make crystal clear that such bunk is vile, dangerous and antithetical to anything and everything that democratic government should be about, and to hold Greene to account for her actions. What happened to Republicans’ belief in personal responsibility?

Requiring that people wear face masks in crowded settings in the middle of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic doesn’t repress individualism. It protects many individuals, so that they’re free to continue breathing and living

She played the victim, deriding “big media companies” and “cancel culture,” and insisting that she “never once said any of the things that I am being accused of today during my campaign” or since being elected.

That brings us back to those metal detectors in the U.S. Capitol

context is everything. The new detectors popped up after a violent invasion of the Capitol. Proudly gun-loving Republican members of Congress have bragged about carrying their firearms everywhere and have coddled voters on the far right who espouse violence against Democrats.

Representative Greg Steube, a Florida Republican, had previously delivered a floor speech in which he said that the detectors weren’t merely unnecessary. They were “atrocities.” Once upon a time, that word had meaning. But then, once upon a time, “freedom” did, too.

“The kids are completely aligned with this complete distortion and disregard for the truth, whether it’s a conspiracy theory with ‘Obamagate’ or this paedophile comment or the most ridiculous one, that this pandemic is a hoax.

rump’s children have been ever present since he announced his wildly improbable run for the presidency at Trump Tower in New York in June 2015. A year later, Don Jr and Ivanka’s husband, Kushner, were present at a Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer who promised dirt on Hillary Clinton. It came to nought but raised questions about the methods of both men.

The children clocked up thousands of air miles campaigning while, behind the scenes, Kushner helped shape a crucial digital strategy. The family gathered with Trump on stage in New York when he stunned the world by winning. Since then, their influence has only grown.

‘I learned it by watching you’ Don Jr and Eric stepped in to run the Trump Organization, the family business, where they have been forced to deny persistent allegations they are exploiting the presidency for profit. Both have also come into their own as bomb-throwers on their father’s behalf.

Two years ago, Don Jr separated from his wife, Vanessa, and began dating Guilfoyle, a lawyer, Fox News host and, incongruously, the ex-wife of Gavin Newsom, then the liberal Democratic mayor of San Francisco, now the governor of California. She joined the Trump campaign last year and has proved every bit as zealous as her boyfriend.

In the coronavirus pandemic, the children have hit the ground running in ways Trump and Biden have not. Trump’s re-election team broadcasts live programming online seven nights a week. This week it launched The Right View, including Guilfoyle and Lara Trump, as a riposte to the popular daytime show The View, which has an all-female panel.

“I’m an outdoorsman, shooter, hunter, and not just, ‘I do one weekend a year to talk about it at a cocktail party for the next two years,’” said Don Jr, who has frequently admitted the irony of the son of a New York billionaire speaking on behalf of blue-collar Americans. “This is the way I choose to live my life when I’m not doing my day job.”

Democrats such as Vela, the former Biden adviser, find the Trump children and their partners as offensive as the president himself. “You’ve got to sell your soul if you’re gonna be a part of it,” he said. “It’s almost like a mafioso operation, the mafia of hate. There is so much hate and hatred filled in their bones and in their hearts. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.”

“It’s very disturbing, the extent to which they’re willing to go, and I guess the most chilling example was where Eric said that after the election we’ll find out that the whole Covid pandemic was cooked up by the Democrats. That’s the extent to which they’re willing to bend reality to stand up for their father. It’s also the tragedy of the Republican party that a lot of politicians are in this same position where in order to stay aligned with Trump, they have to bend reality.”

Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, said: “There’s a lot of talk about that but I think the stark political reality that will hit them all, whether Donald Trump wins re-election or not, is that there are a whole lot of Republicans waiting in the wings for this administration’s transition to lame duck and they are not going to go quietly into that good night.

Aviation is safe in large part because it learns from its disasters. Investigators from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board go immediately to accident sites to begin assessing evidence. After months or even years of research, their detailed reports try to lay out the “accident chain” and explain what went wrong

with respect to the coronavirus pandemic, it has suffered by far the largest number of fatalities, about one-quarter of the global total, despite having less than one-20th of the world’s population.

What if the NTSB were brought in to look at the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic? What would its investigation conclude?

This was a journey straight into a mountainside, with countless missed opportunities to turn away. A system was in place to save lives and contain disaster. The people in charge of the system could not be bothered to avoid the doomed course.

Timelines of aviation disasters typically start long before the passengers or even the flight crew knew anything was wrong, with problems in the design of the airplane, the procedures of the maintenance crew, the route, or the conditions into which the captain decided to fly. In the worst cases, those decisions doomed the flight even before it took off. My focus here is similarly on conditions and decisions that may have doomed the country even before the first COVID-19 death had been recorded on U.S. soil.

What happened once the disease began spreading in this country was a federal disaster in its own right: Katrina on a national scale, Chernobyl minus the radiation. It involved the failure to test; the failure to trace; the shortage of equipment; the dismissal of masks; the silencing or sidelining of professional scientists; the stream of conflicting, misleading, callous, and recklessly ignorant statements by those who did speak on the national government’s behalf

As late as February 26, Donald Trump notoriously said of the infection rate, “You have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down close to zero.” What happened after that—when those 15 cases became 15,000, and then more than 2 million, en route to a total no one can foretell—will be a central part of the history of our times.

1. The Flight Plan

the most important event was the H5N1 “bird flu” outbreak, in 2005. It originated in Asia and was mainly confined there, as the SARS outbreak had been two years earlier. Bush-administration officials viewed H5N1 as an extremely close call. “

Shortly before Barack Obama left office, his administration’s Pandemic Prediction and Forecasting Science and Technology Working Group—yes, that was a thing—released a report reflecting the progress that had been made in applying remote-sensing and AI tools since the early days of Global Argus. The report is freely available online and notes pointedly that recent technological advances “provide opportunities to mitigate large-scale outbreaks by predicting more accurately when and where outbreaks are likely to occur, and how they will progress.”

“Absolutely nothing that has happened has been a surprise. We saw it coming. Not only did we see it, we ran the models and the gaming exercises. We had every bit of the structure in place. We’ve been talking about a biohazard risk like this for years. Anyone who says we did not see this coming has their head in the sand, or is lying through their teeth.”

The system the government set up was designed to warn not about improbable “black swan” events but rather about what are sometimes called “gray rhinos.” These are the large, obvious dangers that will sooner or later emerge but whose exact timing is unknown.

other U.S. leaders had dealt with foreign cover-ups, including by China in the early stages of the SARS outbreak in 2002. Washington knew enough, soon enough, in this case to act while there still was time.

During the Obama administration, the U.S. had negotiated to have its observers stationed in many cities across China, through a program called Predict. But the Trump administration did not fill those positions, including in Wuhan. This meant that no one was on site to learn about, for instance, the unexplained closure on January 1 of the city’s main downtown Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a so-called wet market

“It was in the briefings by the beginning of January,” a person involved in preparing the president’s briefing book told me. “On that there is no dispute.” This person went on: “But knowing it is in the briefing book is different from knowing whether the president saw it.” He didn’t need to spell out his point, which was: Of course this president did not.

To sum up: The weather forecast showed a dangerous storm ahead, and the warning came in plenty of time. At the start of January, the total number of people infected with the virus was probably less than 1,000. All or nearly all of them were in China. Not a single case or fatality had been reported in the United States.

2. The Air Traffic Controllers

In cases of disease outbreak, U.S. leadership and coordination of the international response was as well established and taken for granted as the role of air traffic controllers in directing flights through their sectors

in normal circumstances, its location in China would have been a plus. Whatever the ups and downs of political relations over the past two decades, Chinese and American scientists and public-health officials have worked together frequently, and positively, on health crises ranging from SARS during George W. Bush’s administration to the H1N1 and Ebola outbreaks during Barack Obama’s.

One U.S. official recalled the Predict program: “Getting Chinese agreement to American monitors throughout their territory—that was something.” But then the Trump administration zeroed out that program.

“We had cooperated with China on every public-health threat until now,” Susan Shirk, a former State Department official and longtime scholar of Chinese affairs at UC San Diego, told me. “SARS, AIDS, Ebola in Africa, H1N1—no matter what other disputes were going on in the relationship, we managed to carve out health, and work together quite professionally. So this case is just so anomalous and so tragic.” A significant comparison, she said, is the way the United States and the Soviet Union had worked together to eliminate smallpox around the world, despite their Cold War tensions. But now, she said, “people have definitely died because the U.S. and China have been unable to cooperate.”

What did the breakdown in U.S.-Chinese cooperation mean in practice? That the U.S. knew less than it would have otherwise, and knew it later; that its actions brought out the worst (rather than the merely bad) in China’s own approach to the disease, which was essentially to cover it up internally and stall in allowing international access to emerging data; that the Trump administration lost what leverage it might have had over Chinese President Xi Jinping and his officials; and that the chance to keep the disease within the confines of a single country was forever lost.

In addition to America’s destruction of its own advance-warning system, by removing CDC and Predict observers, the Trump administration’s bellicose tone toward China had an effect. Many U.S. officials stressed that a vicious cycle of blame and recrimination made public health an additional source of friction between the countries, rather than a sustained point of cooperation, as it had been for so many years.

“The state of the relationship meant that every U.S. request was met with distrust on the Chinese side, and every Chinese response was seen on the American side as one more attempt to cover up,”

Several officials who had experience with China suggested that other presidents might have called Xi Jinping with a quiet but tough message that would amount to: We both know you have a problem. Why don’t we work on it together, which will let you be the hero? Otherwise it will break out and become a problem for China and the whole world.

“It would have taken diplomatic pressure on the Chinese government to allow us to insert our people” into Wuhan and other disease centers, Klain said. “The question isn’t what leverage we had. The point is that we gave up leverage with China to get the trade deal done. That meant that we didn’t put leverage on China’s government. We took their explanations at face value.”

3. The Emergency Checklist

The president’s advance notice of the partial European ban almost certainly played an important part in bringing the infection to greater New York City. Because of the two-day “warning” Trump gave in his speech, every seat on every airplane from Europe to the U.S. over the next two days was filled. Airport and customs offices at the arrival airports in the U.S. were unprepared and overwhelmed. News footage showed travelers queued for hours, shoulder to shoulder, waiting to be admitted to the U.S. Some of those travelers already were suffering from the disease; they spread it to others. On March 11, New York had slightly more than 220 diagnosed cases. Two weeks later, it had more than 25,000. Genetic testing showed that most of the infection in New York was from the coronavirus variant that had come through Europe to the United States, rather than directly from China (where most of the early cases in Washington State originated).

Aviation is safe because, even after all the advances in forecasting and technology, its culture still imagines emergencies and rehearses steps for dealing with them.

Especially in the post-9/11 era of intensified concern about threats of all sorts, American public-health officials have also imagined a full range of crises, and have prepared ways to limit their worst effects. The resulting official “playbooks” are the equivalent of cockpit emergency checklists

the White House spokesperson, Kayleigh McEnany, then claimed that whatever “thin packet of paper” Obama had left was inferior to a replacement that the Trump administration had supposedly cooked up, but which has never been made public. The 69-page, single-spaced Obama-administration document is officially called “Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents” and is freely available online. It describes exactly what the Trump team was determined not to do.

What I found remarkable was how closely the Obama administration’s recommendations tracked with those set out 10 years earlier by the George W. Bush administration, in response to its chastening experience with bird flu. The Bush-era work, called “National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza” and publicly available here, differs from the Obama-era playbook mainly in the simpler forms of technology on which it could draw

consider the one below, and see how, sentence by sentence, these warnings from 2005 match the headlines of 2020. The topic was the need to divide responsibility among global, national, state, and community jurisdictions in dealing with the next pandemic. The fundamental premise—so widely shared that it barely needed to be spelled out—was that the U.S. federal government would act as the indispensable flywheel, as it had during health emergencies of the past. As noted, it would work with international agencies and with governments in all affected areas to coordinate a global response. Within its own borders it would work with state agencies to detect the potential for the disease’s spread and to contain cases that did arise:

Referring to the detailed pandemic playbooks from the Bush and Obama administrations, John R. Allen told me: “The moment you get confirmation of a problem, you would move right to the timeline. Decisions by the president, actions by the secretary of defense and the CDC, right down the list. You’d start executing.”Or, in the case of the current administration, you would not. Reading these documents now is like discovering a cockpit checklist in the smoking wreckage.

4. The Pilot

a virtue of Sully is the reminder that when everything else fails—the forecasts, the checklists, the triply redundant aircraft systems—the skill, focus, and competence of the person at the controls can make the difference between life and death.

So too in the public response to a public-health crisis. The system was primed to act, but the person at the top of the system had to say, “Go.” And that person was Donald Trump.

n a resigned way, the people I spoke with summed up the situation this way: You have a head of government who doesn’t know anything, and doesn’t read anything, and is at the mercy of what he sees on TV. “And all around him, you have this carnival,”

“There would be some ballast in the relationship,” this person said. “Now all you’ve got is the trade friction”—plus the personal business deals that the president’s elder daughter, Ivanka, has made in China,

5. The Control Systems

The deadliest airline crash in U.S. history occurred in 1979. An American Airlines DC-10 took off from O’Hare Airport, in Chicago—and just as it was leaving the ground, an incorrectly mounted engine ripped away from one of the wings. When the engine’s pylon was pulled off, it cut the hydraulic lines that led from the cockpit to the control surfaces on the wings and tail. From that point on, the most skillful flight crew in the world could not have saved the flight.

By the time the pandemic emerged, it may have already been too late. The hydraulic lines may already have been too damaged to transmit the signals. It was Trump himself who cut them.

The more complex the organization, the more its success or failure turns on the skill of people in its middle layers—the ones who translate a leader’s decision to the rest of the team in order to get results. Doctors depend on nurses; architects depend on contractors and craftsmen; generals depend on lieutenants and sergeants

Because Donald Trump himself had no grasp of this point, and because he and those around him preferred political loyalists and family retainers rather than holdovers from the “deep state,” the whole federal government became like a restaurant with no cooks, or a TV station with stars but no one to turn the cameras on.

“There is still resilience and competence in the working-level bureaucracy,” an intelligence-agency official told me. “But the layers above them have been removed.”

Traditionally, the National Security Council staff has comprised a concentration of highly knowledgeable, talented, and often ambitious younger figures, mainly on their way to diplomatic or academic careers.

“There is nobody now who can play the role of ‘senior China person,’” a former intelligence official told me. “In a normal administration, you’d have a lot of people who had spent time in Asia, spent time in China, knew the goods and bads.” Also in a normal administration, he and others pointed out, China and the United States would have numerous connective strands

The United States still possesses the strongest economy in the world, its military is by far the most powerful, its culture is diverse, and, confronted with the vicissitudes of history, the country has proved resilient. But a veteran of the intelligence world emphasized that the coronavirus era revealed a sobering reality. “Our system has a single point-of-failure: an irrational president.” At least in an airplane cockpit, the first officer can grab the controls from a captain who is steering the aircraft toward doom.

Every president is “surprised” by how hard it is to convert his own wishes into government actions

Presidents cope with this discovery in varying ways. The people I spoke with had served in past administrations as early as the first George Bush’s. George H. W. Bush came to office with broad experience in the federal government—as much as any other president. He had been vice president for eight years, a CIA director, twice an ambassador, and a member of Congress. He served only four years in the Oval Office but began with a running start. Before he became president, Bill Clinton had been a governor for 12 years and had spent decades learning and talking about government policies. A CIA official told me that Clinton would not read his President’s Daily Briefs in the morning, when they arrived, but would pore over them late at night and return them with copious notes. George W. Bush’s evolution from dependence on the well-traveled Dick Cheney, in his first term, to more confident control, in his second, has been well chronicled. As for Obama, Paul Triolo told me: “By the end of his eight years, Obama really understood how to get the bureaucracy to do what he wanted done, and how to get the information he needed to make decisions.” The job is far harder than it seems. Donald Trump has been uninterested in learning the first thing about it.

In a situation like this, some of those in the “regular” government decide to struggle on. Others quit—literally, or in the giving-up sense

The ‘process’ is just so chaotic that it’s not a process at all. There’s no one at the desk. There’s no one to read the memos. No one is there.”

“If this could happen to Fauci, it makes people think that if they push too hard in the wrong direction, they’ll get their heads chopped off. There is no reason in the world something called #FireFauci should even exist. The nation’s leaders should maintain high regard for scientific empiricism, insight, and advice, and must not be professionally or personally risk averse when it comes to understanding and communicating messages about public safety and health.”

Over nearly two decades, the U.S. government had assembled the people, the plans, the connections, and the know-how to spare this nation the worst effects of the next viral mutation that would, someday, arise. That someday came, and every bit of the planning was for naught. The deaths, the devastation, the unforeseeable path ahead—they did not have to occur.

The language of an NTSB report is famously dry and clinical—just the facts. In the case of the pandemic, what it would note is the following: “There was a flight plan. There was accurate information about what lay ahead. The controllers were ready. The checklists were complete. The aircraft was sound. But the person at the controls was tweeting. Even if the person at the controls had been able to give effective orders, he had laid off people that would carry them out. This was a preventable catastrophe.”

At the time, Gates suggests, the campaign did not dwell on whether the answer was undemocratic or problematic but instead on their view that it was effective.

While the Washington establishment thought Trump’s answer was terrible, Gates writes, the campaign viewed it differently: as a statement that would appeal to voters who appreciated “Trump’s breaking with protocol, his ‘fearlessness’ when it came to challenging the status quo.”