In the early days of the coronavirus outbreak, the Trump administration’s public response to the rapidly-spreading pandemic was basically: Just don’t worry about it. “We’re talking about very small numbers in the United States,” Trump said on March 4 in a White House meeting with airline CEOs, days after he predicted cases would soon go “down to zero” and the virus would “disappear.” (The number of cases in the U.S. has since increased by more than two million.) On the economy, too, the White House continued to claim things were still in great shape, urging calm and projecting optimism even as the markets showed otherwise. “Our economy is doing fantastically,” Trump told Sean Hannity on March 4. “Numbers are coming out very well. The consumer in the United States is unbelievably strong, stronger than ever before, I believe.”
But the same day as Trump was touting the “fantastic” economy and brushing off the virus, one of his top advisers seemingly had a much darker outlook about where things were headed. The Daily Beast reports that on March 4, then-White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney sold between $215,000 and $550,000 in mutual fund holdings, which were largely made up of U.S. stocks. The trades “represented the vast majority of Mulvaney’s holdings in publicly traded funds,” the Daily Beast notes, and Mulvaney didn’t report selling any stocks in 2019, making his sudden sale a sharp departure from his previous stock habits. (Mulvaney, who also served as the director of the Office of Management and Budget, then departed his chief of staff post on March 6. He now serves as the U.S. Special Envoy to Northern Ireland.)
As the Daily Beast points out, Mulvaney’s massive stock dump isn’t necessarily a sign of insider trading or any major impropriety. It was already pretty obvious by March 4 that the coronavirus was becoming a major problem for both Americans’ health and the economy, and the market was showing clear signs of distress by the time Mulvaney decided to sell his stocks. (The stock market did briefly surge on March 4 after Joe Biden’s strong showing on Super Tuesday, though it soon plummeted again.) But the panic-selling suggests that the Trump administration’s public messaging on coronavirus and the economy went not only against the conventional wisdom among public health and economic experts, but even what its own top figures were doing behind closed doors. “The market is in great shape,” Trump said on March 3, while White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow encouraged investors to buy on the dip on March 6. “This is contained,” Kudlow said about the coronavirus at the time.
Indeed, days before dumping his stock, Mulvaney himself was downplaying the coronavirus onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference—where an attendee later tested positive for COVID-19—calling the coronavirus the “hoax of the day” and comparing it to the flu. “The reason you’re seeing so much attention to [the coronavirus] today is that they think this is going to be what brings down the president,” Mulvaney claimed about the press. “That’s what this is all about.” The then-chief of staff added that he had been asked what he would do to calm the markets, responding, “Really, what I might do today [to] calm the markets is tell people turn their televisions off for 24 hours.” “We sit there and watch the markets, and there’s this huge panic, and I’m like, why isn’t there this huge panic every single year over flu?” Mulvaney said. Even after leaving the West Wing, Mulvaney has still continued to publicly insist the pandemic has been overhyped, claiming in late May that the country has “overreacted a little bit” to the coronavirus. “My point is that almost 100,000 people died two years ago from flu and the country didn’t shut down,” Mulvaney said on CNBC. “It’s time to sort of deal with this in the proper perspective, and that’s to allow us to get back to work safely.”