White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows came under fire Sunday for his disastrous comments about the federal government’s approach to combating the coronavirus, brazenly telling CNN’s Jake Tapper that the administration “isn’t going to control the pandemic” but instead “control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics, and other mitigation.” The following day, Meadows tried to walk back his controversial remarks, an apparent acknowledgment of the not-great optics of the Trump administration throwing in the towel on fighting a highly contagious disease that has killed at least 225,000 Americans, upended the 2020 presidential race, and is currently spreading throughout the office of Vice President Mike Pence—an outbreak Meadows tried to keep from the media last week.
Meadows’s on-air bungling of the administration’s coronavirus response is apparently one of many areas of frustration with the chief of staff brewing inside the White House: His latest comments “dismayed many staffers and campaign officials, who say he has largely proved to be an ineffective chief of staff, instead serving more as a political adviser and confidant,” the Washington Post reported. That role is enabled by a close relationship with President Donald Trump, who Meadows, unlike the three previous chiefs of staff, travels with on nearly every trip, often joining him in the private presidential cabin on Air Force One. Their “easy rapport”—another departure from how other chiefs of staff have fared—is sustained, at least in part, by Meadows being an “implementer” for his boss, as one administration official put it. Meadows reportedly had an outsize role in dispatching military personnel across the Capitol this summer, a show of force after nights of civil unrest assembled at Trump’s behest. And Meadows’s recent attempt to keep the second outbreak at the White House under wraps is line with a larger effort to suppress information under his tenure, during which, per the Post, he has “reduced the number of senior staff meetings in the White House, telling aides it was better to have smaller and fewer meetings to minimize leaks, as the president desired” and “has now caught three people who spoke to the news media without authorization.”
Meadows’s allegiance to Trump may be at the expense of his ability to fulfill the management side of the chief-of-staff role, duties like communicating with White House staffers and executing policy that several White House staffers say have largely fallen by the wayside under his tenure. Trying to keep the president happy proved especially damaging for Meadows during Trump’s hospitalization for COVID-19, such as when he helped facilitate Trump’s joyride around Walter Reed “without telling other staffers, meaning the president went without a protective press pool.” Meadows was the only aide to accompany Trump to the hospital earlier this month, and slept in a nearby ICU bed as the president sought treatment; yet the Post reports that despite his access to the situation, the chief of staff left West Wing staffers in the dark: “Four senior administration officials said there was no communication for several days from Meadows to the staff about the president’s condition; whether the West Wing would partially close and whether they should work from home; what precautions were in place after the widespread infections; or how many other staffers had the virus.”
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