First, let it be known that Trump cheated his way into the White House just like he cheated the IRS for 15 years. Now that that’s said, lets talk about how the chump administration failed the American people by downplaying the covid-19 virus. The Trump administration was warned in November about the potential severity of the coronavirus. Instead of warning the American people, chump repeatedly held crowded rallies preaching false information about the virus. He insisted on calling it the China virus and saying that the virus is a hoax.
The warning in November came from a relatively obscure unit of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Center for Military Intelligence, in a report that concluded the coronavirus could be a “cataclysmic event.” Those findings were reportedly briefed to the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the White House. Besides the early warnings from NCMI, Trump’s top trade adviser and various U.S. intelligence agencies warned about a coming disaster throughout late 2019 and early 2020. But President Donald Trump repeatedly maintained that the situation was under control.
Two weeks before Trump took office, the Pentagon put together a 103-page report that outlined the dangers that a “novel respiratory disease” would pose to the military as well as the wider global community, according to documents obtained and published by the Nation last week.
“An outbreak in a single community can quickly evolve into a multinational health crisis that causes millions to suffer, as well as spark major disruption to every facet of society,” the report said.
Asked by ABC News on Sunday if the Pentagon received the NCMI assessment, Defense Secretary Esper said he “can’t recall,” but that “we have many people who watch this closely.”
January and February 2020 — Trade adviser’s warnings ignored
Peter Navarro, Trump’s top trade adviser for the past three years, warned the White House multiple times in January and February that the coronavirus could kill up to 2 million Americans, according to memos obtained by the New York Times and Axios on Tuesday.
In the first memo, Navarro called for an immediate travel ban from China, and said as many as 543,000 people could die. In the second, his projections heightened significantly.
“There is an increasing probability of a full-blown COVID-19 pandemic that could infect as many as 100 million Americans, with a loss of life of as many as 1-2 million souls,” Navarro wrote in the second memo dated February 23.
At the time of the first memo, other top White House officials reportedly dismissed Navarro’s warnings as the rantings of an isolationist crank. “The January travel memo struck me as an alarmist attempt to bring attention to Peter’s anti-China agenda while presenting an artificially limited range of policy options,” a senior administration official told Axios.
“Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were — they just couldn’t get him to do anything about it,” an official told the Post. “The system was blinking red.”
