Trump officials’ own memoirs reveal covid chaos

In her own memoir, former White House adviser Kellyanne Conway reveals how former president Donald Trump shrugged off her warnings about a virus just beginning to creep across the United States. “ ‘Mr. President,’ I said. ‘I’m worried about the coronavirus,’ ” Conway writes in “Here’s The Deal,” recounting a private moment with Trump in the presidential limousine on Feb. 6, 2020. “ ‘I’m not,’ ” she recalls him replying. ‘The doctors told us there is a very low risk for the United States.’ ” Conway says she quickly regretted her “emotional” outburst and tried not to bring up the threat again for several days.

And in “Silent Invasion,” former covid response coordinator Deborah Birx revisits a day in early April 2020 when Trump turned on her, convinced she had misled him about the virus’s severity. “ ‘We will never shut down the country again. Never,’ ” she relates Trump telling her, before striding out to lead another covid news briefing. It was the effective end of Birx’s influence on the president, she writes, just five weeks after she assumed the role.

More than a dozen former Trump officials have written books that attempt to influence how history will judge the administration’s pandemic response — and not incidentally, their own roles in it. The book covers and blurbs promise revelations about a crisis that quickly swamped the country, shaped the 2020 election and continues to reverberate more than two years later.

But across more than 4,000 pages of memoirs reviewed by The Washington Post — from tell-alls by senior health leaders to lesser-known books, such as an October 2021 memoir by former national security official Keith Kellogg, the picture that emerges is of an administration uniquely unsuited to meet the demands of a pandemic. While Kushner, Conway, Birx and others serve up different slices of shared history, their memoirs collectively reveal a White House where top appointees and career scientists were forced to jockey for influence with a mercurial leader — an indictment of Trump and his feuding deputies, written by some of the people who shared the room with them.

Several claims have made news or shaped congressional investigations. In “The Chief’s Chief,” published last year, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows revealed that Trump had secretly tested positive for covid on Sept. 26, 2020, three days before a presidential debate, altering the…