The severity of COVID-19 struck Donald Trump for the first time after an older, wealthy friend of the New York real estate developer fell ill and fought for his life in the president’s city hospital, writes Dr. Deborah Birx in new memoirs.
“Suddenly, this pandemic was not abstract to him, but very real and personal,” Birx said in “Silent Invasion: The Untold Story of the Trump Administration, COVID-19, and Preventing the Next Pandemic Before It’s Too Late.” . As the global pandemic took off, Trump was momentarily battling for his own mortality when he learned that Crown Acquisitions founder Stanley Chera was rapidly deteriorating at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, New York. “I know this hospital. What is happening there is horrible,” Trump said after examining reports of an increase in the number of cases in March 2020. “President Trump described Chera as a friend and began to publicly observe how vicious COVID-19 could be,” Birx wrote. “I saw this as the president acknowledging that not only in age – Chera was only a few years older – but in similar economic circumstances he could not count on wealth as a form of immunity.” Trump was initially reluctant to adopt a strategy to slow the spread of COVID-19. But the resistance melted, Birx said, as he exposed the potentially catastrophic prospect of not acting decisively. Birks was trying to win over Trump by locking him in the US for another 30 days to prevent hospitals from collapsing. By the time they spoke, the White House had already announced in the country that it took “15 days to slow down the spread.” “I’m sure we will have fifty, a hundred, and possibly a thousand Elmhurst hospitals,” Birx said in an intervention to extend the shelter recommendations. “We will see city after city resembling what New York is doing right now. It will only get worse.” Everyone’s perspective, he said, is what hit Trump the hardest. “You mean there will be bags there? Truck refrigerators? Just like in Elmhurst?” Trump asked as he presented him with forecasts for up to 200,000 COVID-related deaths by May 2020. “Yes, Mr. President. Hundreds of hospitals,” Birx said of the unfortunate prognosis. After brief consultation with Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Birx said Trump had agreed to move carefully for another month. Chera died on April 11, 2020 at the age of 77. “What mattered today was that the president – perhaps paradoxically for many – had done the right thing,” Birx wrote of Trump’s lockdown deal.

Trump’s tone towards Birks changed after the end of the lockdown

In the book, Birx praised Trump for agreeing to a nationwide voluntary closure, where the federal government encouraged people to avoid unnecessary travel or group gatherings. But he said he opened it immediately after it started. “We will never close the country again. Never,” he told her a few days after the lockdown in early April 2020.
“His daughters were hardened to the point of anger,” Birx wrote of the conflict, adding: “I felt blood running down my face and I shivered slightly.” Birx remembers the decision to close the country until the last time Trump showed up to take her advice or even recognize her. He said he did not know what changed Trump’s mind, but later wrote in the book that he suspected the president had already spoken to Dr. Scott Atlas. Trump brought Atlanta to the White House in August 2020, and in her book Birx often writes about how the two clashed. Birx wanted strong mitigation measures that included testing, virtual work, social distance, isolation and masking, but Atlas wanted the US to focus only on older, vulnerable adults and worry less about younger people being infected. Atlas had previously worked as a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank based at Stanford University. He was not an infectious disease specialist, but told Birx that his approach was what the president wanted. “I became a non-entity,” Birx wrote of her relationship with Trump. “He did not seem to find anything useful in what I had to offer.”