Tony's Diary Package — page 251

New Yorker Magazine on 2020.07.15 Letter from Krishnamoorth Amazing Day!! The setting is the extreme tension in the press and in the White House about the USA Today OpEd by Peter Navarro and the "list" of my mistakes sent out by WH Comms. On my way by car to the WH for the TF meeting, I received a call from the POTUS. He started off by saying that this tension of me versus him is terrible and needs to stop. He "loves" me and know we have a very special relationship and have bonded right from the beginning. He is furious about the Navarro OpEd and said (as Mark Meadows walked into the room and he put me on speaker phone): "I am going to tell Navarro if he says or writes one fucking word against you I am going to kick his fucking ass out the fucking door. Mark, make sure Novarro understands, one more word and he is out the fucking door and he won't come back". He then started to talk to me about how bad or not things were. He wanted me to be "positive". I took the opportunity to say" "Mr. President, with your permission, can I be absolutely frank with you? We have a problem and we need to own it. We need to admit that the situation is serious, otherwise we completely lose credibility. We should own the problem and then emphasize how we are going to fix it as opposed to denying the problem". He was not entirely happy with this but said that he understood the point that I was making. It was a very good conversation. Then after the TF meeting ended, I got a note from the Sit Room staff that Mark Meadows was on the phone from Air Force One and wanted to speak with me. He had seen the interview from The Atlantic and was angry that I had not "walked back" my statement about the 1918 pandemic on that interview. He was again angry and said he thought that I agreed that I would walk back the statement today. I told him I was going to wait until tomorrow when I am on the NewsHour with Judy Woodruff. That was not good enough for him. He wanted it done today. He was also pissed that I had mentioned to the press that we had met and I spoke about the nature of our conversation. He was clearly over-reacting since even he admitted the press knew about our meeting, but I do not think I said anything else to them except that we had met. Anyway, on the way back to NIH I called Sanjay Gupta and asked him to quote me tonight on his TV hit on CNN and say that I wanted to clarify that on the Georgetown interview, I did not mean to imply that COVID-19 would be as bad (50-100 million deaths) as was 1918. Sanjay agreed to do this. I texted this information back to Mark on Air Force One and he replied: "Thanks for getting back with me. We are going to make this work." The media is totally buzzing about the tension between me and White House. Amazing support for me and blowing off of Navarro and the "list" PRESS: The Atlantic Pulse with Ed Yong; Interview with New Yorker Magazine on COVID vaccine with Dhruv Khullar;