tests and who might need them and as a result testing did start to shoot up, the google effort didn t really pan out but more people were able to get tests, the numbers started going up, president trump who had said that the virus would go away imminently was now being proven wrong by the day, looking more foolish as those cases rose, looking to take his anger out on someone, he took it out on his health secretary, but in reality there were lots of people, including the president s son-in-law, who were working to make testing a reality. you know, this illustrates, i think, what may be one of the larger dreams of the book, at least what i learned from the book from your reporting of it, which is that there was a consistent issue of who was actually in charge. who was the one actually making things happen. was it mike pence, was it deborah birx, was it jared kushner on testing? it doesn t seem like it was the president of the united states. talk to us about why this ended up being such
at the bureaucracy was sometimes warranted. president trump thought the vaccine could be developed in under a year, he was right, but in many cases his frustration and anger it just became an obstacle to work around. president trump would rail about people needing to be fired, for instance, he wanted to fire the emergency preparedness chief who helped send those infected americans back from overseas. he wanted to fire the state department official who helped with that effort. president trump s department deputies avoided carrying out that order. obviously president trump wanted to fire tony fauci, too. that didn t happen. try to imagine putting on a morning show where someone is trying to fire you and brianna constantly and you re trying to do your job. there s only so much of that that is going to be able to be walled off from what you re trying to do. president trump constantly created challenges for his own team including who was making the dienl call? was it mike pence at the coron