The number of warnings the Trump White House had that a pandemic might be a problem would be almost comical if we weren’t living in a tragedy. A study just last September warned that a pandemic could kill hundreds of thousands of people and badly damage the economy. And the study was written by a pair of White House economists at the request of the National Security Council, so, yes, people in the White House saw it.
The 2019 study didn’t predict that the novel coronavirus was coming—rather, it predicted the scope of economic damage from a pandemic and called for a push on vaccine creation capacity—but it’s yet another reminder that there were people taking the possibility of a pandemic seriously immediately before President Donald Trump spent months denying it could possibly happen here.
Let’s recap the other warnings the Trump administration was given and ignored. (Or the ones we know about, anyway.) At this rate it seems like we’re learning about a new one every week or so; the list may yet grow.
There was the pandemic playbook from 2016 that drew on lessons from the Ebola outbreak and warned specifically about testing and protective gear, as well as outlining how different government agencies could work together for the most effective response. But that came from the Obama administration, so obviously Team Trump wasn’t going to learn its lessons.
That wasn’t the Obama administration’s only effort to prepare Trump and his people for a pandemic. During the transition, the Obama administration conducted a disaster response exercise with the Trump transition team that included a pandemic.
Instead, Trump spent the last three years dismantling America's pandemic preparedness, from firing the pandemic response team and Homeland Security adviser Tom Bossert, who had warned of the need to be prepared for a pandemic, to scrapping years of Department of Homeland Security simulations on the effects of a pandemic.
It’s as if instead of practicing for how to respond effectively to this crisis, the Trump administration intentionally planned how to respond as badly as possible. But Occam’s razor suggests it’s not an intentional plan for this specific situation. It’s just the administration’s general incompetence and disdain for good governance or planning for anything.
