In a tabletop exercise days before an untested new president took power, officials briefed the incoming administration on a scenario remarkably like the one he faces now.
Seven days before Donald Trump took office, his aides faced a major test: the rapid, global spread of a dangerous virus in cities like London and Seoul, one serious enough that some countries were imposing travel bans.
In a sober briefing, Trump’s incoming team learned that the disease was an emerging pandemic — a strain of novel influenza known as H9N2 — and that health systems were crashing in Asia, overwhelmed by the demand.
“Health officials warn that this could become the worst influenza pandemic since 1918,” Trump’s aides were told. Soon, they heard cases were popping up in California and Texas.
The briefing was intended to hammer home a new, terrifying reality facing the Trump administration, and the incoming president’s responsibility to protect Americans amid a crisis. But unlike the coronavirus pandemic currently ravaging the globe, this 2017 crisis didn’t really happen — it was among a handful of scenarios presented to Trump’s top aides as part of a legally required transition exercise with members of the outgoing administration of Barack Obama.
And in the words of several attendees, the atmosphere was “weird” at best, chilly at worst.
POLITICO obtained documents from the meeting and spoke with more than a dozen attendees to help provide the most detailed reconstruction of the closed-door session yet. It was perhaps the most concrete and visible transition exercise that dealt with the possibility of pandemics, and top officials from both sides — whether they wanted to be there or not — were forced to confront a whole-of-government response to a crisis. The Trump team was told it could face specific challenges, such as shortages of ventilators, anti-viral drugs and other medical essentials, and that having a coordinated, unified national response was “paramount” — warnings that seem eerily prescient given the ongoing coronavirus crisis.
But roughly two-thirds of the Trump representatives in that room are no longer serving in the administration. That extraordinary turnover in the months and years that followed is likely one reason his administration has struggled to handle the very real pandemic it faces now, former Obama administration officials said.
“The advantage we had under Obama was that during the first four years we had the same White House staff, the same Cabinet,” said former deputy labor secretary Chris Lu, who attended the gathering. “Just having the continuity makes all the difference in the world.”
Sean Spicer, Trump’s first White House press secretary, was among those who participated in the meeting. He said he understood the reasons such exercises could be useful, but described the encounter as a massive transfer of information that ultimately felt very theoretical. In real life, things are never as simple as what’s presented in a table-top exercise, he said.
“There’s no briefing that can prepare you for a worldwide pandemic,” added Spicer, who left the administration in mid-2017.
The outgoing Obama aides and incoming Trump aides gathered for roughly three hours on the afternoon of Friday, Jan. 13, 2017, in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House.
At least 30 representatives of Trump’s team — many of them soon-to-be Cabinet members — were present, each sitting next to their closest Obama administration counterpart. Incoming Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross appeared to keep dozing off. Incoming Energy Secretary Rick Perry was getting along famously with Ernest Moniz, the man he was replacing, several fellow participants said.
But it was clear some on the Trump team had barely, if ever, spoken with the people they were replacing. News had broken that same day about national security adviser Michael Flynn’s unusual contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, so his presence in the meeting added to the surrealness. Some members of both groups kept going in and out of the room, but most paid quiet attention to the presentations, which were led by top Obama aides.
Obama aides, in op-eds and essays ripping the Trump administration’s handling of the coronavirus, officially called COVID-19, have pointed to the Jan. 13, 2017, session as a key example of their effort to press the importance of pandemic preparedness to their successors.
In a Friday op-ed, Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser, blasted Trump for comments such as “you can never really think” that a pandemic like the coronavirus “is going to happen.” She mentioned the 2017 session as one of many instances of the Obama administration’s efforts to help its successor be ready for such a challenge. She also slammed the Trump team for dismantling the National Security Council section that would play a lead role in organizing the U.S. response to a global pandemic.
“Rather than heed the warnings, embrace the planning and preserve the structures and budgets that had been bequeathed to him, the president ignored the risk of a pandemic,” Rice wrote. (Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton, who oversaw the dissolution of the NSC’s global health security and biodefense section, has defended it as necessary streamlining, countering that global health “remained a top NSC priority.” Trump, when recently asked about the reshuffling, called the question “nasty” and said, “I don’t know anything about it.”)
The Obama and Trump teams met in the afternoon, sitting around tables arranged in a rectangle. Participants were given a binder of unclassified materials titled “Presidential Transition Exercise Series,” the contents of which were obtained by POLITICO. The purpose of the exercise, the documents state, was to “familiarize” the incoming team with “domestic incident management policy and practices and continuity of government programs” in case it faced a major crisis. One key goal was to explain to participants the various legal authorities they had to pursue a response, and which agencies had which capabilities and responsibilities. The references provided included detailed explanations of numerous laws and regulations that might affect their work, such as the Oil Pollution Act of 1990.
Aside from the H9N2 pandemic exercise, the participants discussed the case study of how the Obama administration handled Hurricane Sandy in 2012. One section covered a potential cyber incident. Another went through how to respond to a domestic terrorism incident, in this case one carried out by a group of U.S. citizens who placed bombs in nearby spots during a major sporting event in a U.S. city. The terror squad not only detonates the bombs, it also engages in a mass shooting and takes a dozen hostages.
Using the materials, Monaco led the discussion. Her incoming counterpart, Tom Bossert, acted as a “semi co-chair,” attendees said. Ross, the then 79-year-old incoming Commerce secretary, was spotted with his eyes closed on more than one occasion. Elaine Chao, tapped to run the Department of Transportation, paid close attention. Several attendees noted the tense body language between Rice and Flynn, who lasted only a few weeks as Trump’s national security adviser and was ousted amid questions over his dealings with Russian officials.
And then there was the Energy Department duo: Perry, the incoming secretary who previously served as the governor of Texas, and Moniz, the outgoing secretary and famed physicist. The pair seemed to get along fabulously, which stood out to other attendees given the overall distrust between the two teams and the fact that Perry had once proposed getting rid of the Energy Department altogether.
It was a “semi-bizarro lovefest” between the two, a fellow participant said. “They were ready to go make a buddy movie.”
Perry didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. But in a statement, Moniz, who now leads the Energy Futures Initiative, said, “It is correct that [Perry] and I offered relevant perspectives from a governor’s and Cabinet secretary’s seat, respectively. As governor of Texas for a long time, Perry had been through many episodes needing crisis management.”
For the most part, however, the Trump team was in receive mode.
Partly, that was not a surprise: Many of Trump’s personnel choices had little or no government experience, and the Obama aides were presenting massive troves of information to them about how a raft of agencies had to work together to respond to various crises.
Multiple current and former Trump officials reached by POLITICO said they did not recall much about the briefing. But some Obama aides who attended said they were left with the impression that many of the Trump aides showed up to simply check off a box more than to learn. The impression was boosted in part because the transition overall was going so poorly. Several Trump nominees had barely even spoken to their Obama counterparts.
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