The White House says that President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania have both tested positive for the coronavirus. GBH Morning Edition host Joe Mathieu spoke with former Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary and GBH News contributor Juliette Kayyem about what this means for the Trump Administration. The transcript has been edited for clarity.
Joe Mathieu: You're one of the first people I was seeing tweeting about this. Can you give us a sense, just to start with, what happened in the White House complex overnight -- say, 1:00 [or] 2:00 in the morning -- when most of the country was asleep and this news was just breaking?
Juliette Kayyem: So basically, there's I think three parts to this and I think they're getting muddled in a lot of the commentary. The first one is clearly there is an individual who is sick, and that happens to be the President of the United States. All the people around him who may have been affected are senior ranking people in the government. That's relevant, but they also are human beings with family and friends who they may seen. So you're just going to get your typical testing and tracing system, try to get people to quarantine and isolate. That has political implications because, of course, this is a White House that has balked at treating COVID seriously. The second area security I think about, of course, is homeland security. And I think this is where people should be assured, however distressing this may be [and] however you feel about Donald Trump, our constitutional and statutory structures anticipate that the leader of our nation could be ill or even die, so we have systems in place. They're called continuity of government and continuity of operations. The continuity of government is making sure that individuals are replaced, so we have a vice president, the speaker of the House. Continuity of operations, of course, being the government functions.
The third is the national security side. And I think this the bad news side. America has been viewed by the globe as being on its knees because of COVID, and there was shock, horror, embarrassment and pity for the United States because of how we had not been able to control the virus. So much so that we're isolated; we're not able to travel to most places. I think that sense of America's resiliency -- America's greatness, if you want to call it -- is long lost, and Trump's diagnosis is a reflection of that. And enemies and and allies are taking notice.
Mathieu: Well, that's a pretty sad thing to hear you say, Juliette. But when we consider the continuity of government, we know how COVID spreads. Mike Pence has been around President Trump, Nancy Pelosi has been around the people we're talking about [and] Chuck Grassley has. We're talking about people who could all be at risk at once.
Kayyem: Right, and a Supreme Court nominee. Let's remember a different branch of government was around them as well. Look, the list goes far down. Then it goes to cabinet secretaries. People like me get a weird sense of calmness when you start to see these processes go into place because you see America's resiliency, how generations before this thought through this [and] how various continuity plans are likely in place right now, both within the White House and the agencies, to ensure no one takes advantage of this news -- no one on the outside, as we head towards an election in which there's been a potential or there is actually foreign interference. So I think in that regard, structurally the good news is that Trump is not the presidency. He is an individual who may be sick, who may have bad symptoms or not. We don't know yet, so we should be careful in that regard. But he is not the presidency. The presidency is a constitutional structure, and we have systems to make sure that there is, in fact, a president of the United States.
Mathieu: You point out something really important, the fact that we actually do not know if Donald Trump and Melania Trump are feeling symptoms. Now, we've not seen tests, of course, and this is a White House that as Jake Sherman tweets this morning from Politico does not have the public's trust, not on matters of the coronavirus or many other, for that matter, at least [for] half the country. Now, this is not an easy part to talk about here and I want to be careful, but when you don't have the public's trust on something like this, this is why stock futures also start to tumble and the level of uncertainty is exaggerated.
Kayyem: It is. And I think that's exactly right. I mean, one would not trust anything coming out of this White House. In fact, some of the early reporting -- I don't know if you're reporting it but CNN and The New York Times are -- that the White House tried to actually hide the Hope Hicks news. And so, yeah, there's no reason to believe them.
Mathieu: Do you believe that Donald Trump has COVID?
Kayyem: I believe that Donald Trump has COVID.
Mathieu: You do?
Kayyem: Oh, yes, I do.
Mathieu: So there'd be no reason to put this out there for any sort of sympathy vote or anything?
Kayyem: No, because I actually think that the politics of this -- and they must know this -- is pretty bad for them. Exhibit number one for the abysmal Trump administration response towards COVID is now Donald Trump. This cannot be good for them politically, so the stuff I'm seeing as well online about whether it's actually true there, I'm not a political commentator but let me just tell you, I can't imagine any world in which this is a good news scenario for Trump because he's Exhibit A now. He could not keep it out of his own home, something that he he literally said eight hours before at a fundraiser is getting under control. And I think that's how we have to look at the next month, whether the debates will occur, what is his health like [and] how does he go forward with the election?
Mathieu: What needs to happen next? You think of the old image of someone sitting there with the proverbial newspaper. How do they prove that Trump is well? How do they prove that his symptoms are under control?
Kayyem: So part of it may be that we actually see him. Boris Johnson [and] other leaders [that] have had it would would have press conferences for it. Boris Johnson, people should remember in the UK, did end up in the hospital, however. And so I think it's going to be actually looking at him. But no one should pretend that the American public will have confidence in either whether the president is feeling okay or doesn't have symptoms. This is on them, though, right? This is four years or, more specifically, eight months of lying about the pandemic that is coming home to them. That is why I just think from the perspective of "what's your symbol for how bad the White House's response has been?" Well, it's 200,000 plus Americans dead and Donald Trump now has it.
