Why Trump Was Deaf to All the Warnings He Received

Why Trump Was Deaf to All the Warnings He Received

Why Trump Was Deaf to All the Warnings He Received

“There has been so much unnecessary death in this country,” President Donald Trump said Monday at his daily coronavirus briefing. “It could have been stopped and it could have been stopped short, but somebody a long time ago, it seems, decided not to do it that way. And the whole world is suffering because of it.” The remark is classic Trump—warning darkly but vaguely about unidentified enemies—but insofar as anyone made such a decision, it was the president himself. The virus is not, of course, Trump’s fault, but the federal government’s handling of the outbreak is his responsibility. And one of the more astonishing revelations of the past month has been not just that the president was warned, but that he was warned over and over again and still declined to act. The Washington Post reports that the President’s Daily Brief, or PDB, an intelligence report on national-security threats, mentioned the coronavirus “more than a dozen” times in January and February, a period during which the Trump administration was doing little to prepare for a pandemic, and when the president himself was often downplaying the threat the virus posed to the United States. The oversight would come as a surprise if not for the long line of warnings that the president is known to have ignored. Here’s a partial timeline: Starting “at the beginning of January,” and continuing through February, the PDB repeatedly mentioned the outbreak, according to the Post. By mid- or late January, the coronavirus was a frequent and central topic. On January 18, per The New York Times, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar first briefed Trump about the virus, via phone. On January 22, speaking to CNBC in Davos, Switzerland, Trump dismissed the virus: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control.” (He also expressed confidence that China was forthcoming about the outbreak.) On January 27, the Post has reported, top White House aides met about the virus, with one warning that an outbreak could cost Trump his reelection. On January 29, the trade adviser Peter Navarro wrote in a memo that the virus could cause mass loss of life and economic destruction. On January 31, Trump banned entry into the U.S. for most foreigners who had been in China, though by then there were already cases in the United States, and the ban excepted Americans who had been in China. After a February 5 briefing, senators asked the White House to act more aggressively. “Just left the Administration briefing on Coronavirus,” tweeted Senator Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat. “Bottom line: they aren’t taking this seriously enough.
Why Trump Was Deaf to All the Warnings He Received