According to a new book by a couple and wife who were at the centre of the White House pandemic response, Donald Trump nixed a proposal to be immunised against COVID-19 alongside prior presidents during his last weeks in office.
The president had only just recovered from the virus at that point, in late 2020.
However, media kept asking government representatives when he would get the new vaccination.
So, according to Brian Morgenstern, then-White House deputy press secretary and deputy communications director, “we began thinking different situations in which the president might take the vaccination in a public fashion.”
One of the suggestions was for the president to bring the past presidents to the White House or another location so they could all get the vaccination at once as a sign of unity.
Although the president may still have antibodies from his battle with the illness, aides reasoned that the incident showed his faith in the vaccine’s efficacy.
The notion of having Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush appear with him was presented to the president in his private study by Morgenstern and another assistant.
According to Morgenstern, “He formed a look that expressed, may we say, a healthy scepticism.”
He stated: “Will get the shot. Do they want that I get the shot? Will get the shot.”
However, when asked about a gathering with the previous presidents, he said, “Nah, I’m a different sort of a man, you know?”
He really had his first shot in secret before leaving the White House in January 2021, but he didn’t tell anybody about it until months later.
The event is one of several behind-the-scenes stories told in Brian and Teresa Morgenstern’s book “Vignettes and Vino.”
At the White House, Teresa served as the senior communications advisor for Operation Warp Speed, a government initiative to create a vaccine quickly.
During some of the administration’s most trying periods, it places them at its centre.
But rather than writing the customary political tell-all, they instead wrote a book that combines recipes with amusing tales.
The majority of publications that come out of the Trump White House are very unfavourable, offensive, and divisive. And this is supposed to be sort of the fun part,” Teresa remarked.
We’re one of a number of married couples who worked in the White House and the administration, you know. But I believe that working on Operation Warp Speed, the COVID-19 task force, and all of those wonderful things together was such a great and unique experience.
The book takes readers aboard Air Force One and inside sessions where COVID adviser Debra Birx and Vice President Mike Pence had a disagreement.
A tour of the West Wing is also provided, including stops at the Oval Office and the dining room that Trump used as his study.
For reasons we don’t need to examine in this book, the president called the area across from the bathroom “the store,” and some of us called it “the shop.”
They adopt a more diplomatic stance than former adviser Cliff Sims, whose book “Team of Vipers” published in 2019 detailed how Trump would take great pleasure in entertaining guests with crude comments about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky’s romance.
The book “Vignettes and Vino” will be released by Post Hill Press in October.
Some of the dishes were created by the pair during the lockdown, when Teresa was stranded at home while Brian worked long days in the White House.
They also relate thematically to the problems brought up in each chapter. Consequently, there are two drinks: a “No-Collusion Mule” and a salad with “Turf War Dressing.”
Brian added, “There’s a chapter about debating the Tiger King and deciding whether or not we were going to pardon.” Therefore, Joe Exotic was partnered with an exotic dish, you know.
They disclose that the White House very briefly contemplated the possibility of pardoning Exotic, who had been given a 22-year sentence for engaging in an attempted murder-for-hire plot.
As public demand for a pardon grew, Trump was questioned about the matter at a White House news conference, but he said that he was unfamiliar with the programme or its actors.
Then, one day, Brian was talking with Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany while on Air Force One in the president’s cabin about attempting to generate an internet outrage by just tweeting a tiger emoji without any other context.
While the president and chief of staff Mark Meadows were speaking about something else, Meadows perked up his ears and inquired for further details.
As McEnany was trying to explain, he interrupted her.
Meadows quickly said, “Yeah, it doesn’t seem like anything we need to be associated with,” having had enough of hearing about “murder-for-hire.”
The end product is intended to be a book that offers food, beverages, and conversation starters for a dinner party.
Brian said, “We saw unfathomable conditions in the White House with a pandemic Supreme Court confirmation, racial riots throughout the nation, and highly controversial elections, all at the same time.”
We received the best crisis communications training anybody has ever had, to put it mildly.
But in the end, “the reason we got through it with clear heads, and didn’t absolutely go crazy, was because of our families and our friends and being grounded and having faith and recognising that what truly counts is family, friends, good food, good beverages, and togetherness,”