I thought this Frontline podcast was a good overview of how Trump dropped the ball during those precious early days of the crisis when it would have made a big difference.
Inside the Trump administration’s coronavirus response — and missed opportunities to contain COVID-19 before it was too late. Correspondent Martin Smith speaks with global health experts about warnings to the White House that went unheeded, including a health policy expert who said his 2019 study pointing to the threat of a pandemic was met with silence.
As he investigates how the crisis unfolded in the U.S., Smith finds: “There’s a lot of unknowns as to who dropped the ball and when. It’s clear that at the top, and I mean by that the president, the wrong messages were being given.”
And, by the way, the wrong message continue to be given, day in and day out, when the president insists on holding his daily coronavirus rally and spewing out every nonsensical thought that passes through his mind.
UPDATE:
Oh my dear God. It was way worse than even that. The New York Times has published a huge, damning report that absolutely must be read from beginning to end. An excerpt:
Throughout January, as Mr. Trump repeatedly played down the seriousness of the virus and focused on other issues, an array of figures inside his government — from top White House advisers to experts deep in the cabinet departments and intelligence agencies — identified the threat, sounded alarms and made clear the need for aggressive action.
The president, though, was slow to absorb the scale of the risk and to act accordingly, focusing instead on controlling the message, protecting gains in the economy and batting away warnings from senior officials.
[…]
The shortcomings of Mr. Trump’s performance have played out with remarkable transparency as part of his daily effort to dominate television screens and the national conversation.
But dozens of interviews with current and former officials and a review of emails and other records revealed many previously unreported details and a fuller picture of the roots and extent of his halting response as the deadly virus spread:
The National Security Council office responsible for tracking pandemics received intelligence reports in early January predicting the spread of the virus to the United States, and within weeks was raising options like keeping Americans home from work and shutting down cities the size of Chicago. Mr. Trump would avoid such steps until March.
- Despite Mr. Trump’s denial weeks later, he was told at the time about a Jan. 29 memo produced by his trade adviser, Peter Navarro, laying out in striking detail the potential risks of a coronavirus pandemic: as many as half a millions deaths and trillions of dollars in economic losses.
- The health and human services secretary, Alex M. Azar II, directly warned Mr. Trump of the possibility of a pandemic during a call on Jan. 30, the second warning he delivered to the president about the virus in two weeks. The president, who was on Air Force One while traveling for appearances in the Midwest, responded that Mr. Azar was being alarmist.
- Mr. Azar publicly announced in February that the government was establishing a “surveillance” system in five American cities to measure the spread of the virus and enable experts to project the next hot spots. It was delayed for weeks. The slow start of that plan, on top of the well-documented failures to develop the nation’s testing capacity, left administration officials with almost no insight into how rapidly the virus was spreading. “We were flying the plane with no instruments,” one official said.
- By the third week in February, the administration’s top public health experts concluded they should recommend to Mr. Trump a new approach that would include warning the American people of the risks and urging steps like social distancing and staying home from work. But the White House focused instead on messaging and crucial additional weeks went by before their views were reluctantly accepted by the president — time when the virus spread largely unimpeded.
When Mr. Trump finally agreed in mid-March to recommend social distancing across the country, effectively bringing much of the economy to a halt, he seemed shellshocked and deflated to some of his closest associates. One described him as “subdued” and “baffled” by how the crisis had played out. An economy that he had wagered his re-election on was suddenly in shambles.
I would say that it is unbelievable but sadly it is totally believable. Indeed, it couldn’t have been worse. But what could anyone expect when you put a celebrity con man with a verys serious personality disorder in charge of the country?