How the Obama administration tried to save us from what Trump is doing right now

Joan McCarter

Daily Kos Staff

Tuesday March 17, 2020 · 12:27 PM PDT

2020/03/17 · 12:27

WASHINGTON, DC - NOVEMBER 10: President-elect Donald Trump (L) talks after a meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama (R) in the Oval Office November 10, 2016 in Washington, DC. Trump is scheduled to meet with members of the Republican leadership in Congress later today on Capitol Hill. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images) — President Obama tried. He really tried.

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In a normal world, the president of the United States would be responding competently and effectively to a global pandemic, helping along with the rest of the leaders of the industrialized nations to combat it around the world. The last president of the United States, Barack Obama, and his administration tried to make that happen. They really tried. But no one could predict just how bad Donald Trump would be.

In January 2017, the Obama administration’s transition team conducted tabletop disaster response activities with Trump's top aides. One of those tests was eerily prescient—a strain of novel and deadly influenza they called H9N2, origination in Asia and quickly spreading to Europe and then to the U.S. "Health officials warn that this could become the worst influenza pandemic since 1918," the Obama team told Trump's aides in the exercise, according to the documents and interviews from that transition effort obtained by Politico.

Those materials show that the "Trump team was told it could face specific challenges, such as shortages of ventilators, anti-viral drugs and other medical essentials, and that having a coordinated, unified national response was 'paramount.'" Clearly, for the one-third of the Trump team—including now-Cabinet members—that was on hand then and is still on board, the exercise failed. The rest of that Trump team, by the way, is long gone from the administration; probably the two-thirds that might have helped right this ship. Which is why Trump has gotten rid of them. Like he got rid of the CDC and NSC pandemic response teams.

So when you hear "no one could have predicted" from Trump and team about this pandemic, well, now you know.

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