More than a dozen former officials in Donald Trump's administration have revealed in their memoirs how the former president and his team were "uniquely unsuited" to handle the coronavirus pandemic.
The Washington Post reviewed more than 4,000 pages from those publications written by health leaders, White House advisers and other Trump officials that, taken together, show an administration where top appointees and career scientists fought for the attention of an easily distracted and temperamental president and his deputies -- and their quarrels continue in print.
“What I see now mostly is political scapegoating and blaming,” Brett Giroir, the administration’s coronavirus testing coordinator whose own book is due next year, told the Post in an email. “My book is VERY different."
Dr. Deborah Birx, a career civil servant who served as the White House pandemic coordinator, admits she sometimes concealed her long-term goals in hopes of persuading Trump on short-term policies, but she detailed how Scott Atlas, a Stanford radiologist who won favor with the former president, provided hopeful but misleading data minimizing the risks.
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"‘We will never shut down the country again. Never,’ ” Trump told her in April 2020, according to Birx's own memoir.
However, most of these books have been harshly criticized as self-serving and misleading, and critics say those Trump officials should have spoken out when they were serving in the administration instead of waiting until they had a book deal.
“This is my first call to ban a book,” said Sheila Kaplan, a former New York Times reporter who covered the coronavirus response, after Birx’s book was announced. “When Birx was in office, she hung up on me when I called from NYT to ask what was happening. At this point, who cares what she has to say?”
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