Why Trump Was Deaf to All the Warnings He Received
The
president’s incuriosity and paranoia hobbled his response.
APRIL 29, 2020
Staff writer at The Atlantic
“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. Notably, no request for ANY emergency funding, which is a big
mistake. Local health systems need supplies, training, screening staff
etc. And they need it now.”
- On February 25, Nancy Messonnier of the National Center
for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases warned that “disruption to
everyday life may be severe” as a result of the virus. Trump was reportedly furious that Messonnier had
needlessly scared the public. He did not recommend social distancing until
March 16.
In addition, the Post reports that American officials embedded at
the World Health Organization‚ which Trump has since blamed for covering up the
outbreak, were feeding information about the coronavirus to Washington,
starting late last year.
These specific warnings about the novel coronavirus don’t
even include the generalized concerns about a pandemic that
circulated for years before. Neither do they speak to the steps that the Trump
administration took that may have reduced American preparedness,
including eliminating a National Security Council
office devoted to pandemics and cutting Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention staff in China who might have provided more early warnings.
How many warnings did the president need?
There’s
likely no number of alerts that would have jarred the president into action,
for two reasons. First, Trump is constitutionally incurious, and second, he is
paranoid, such that he took warnings that might have helped him politically to
be attacks designed to hurt him politically.
Start
with the PDBs. Based on Trump’s track record, it’s a good
bet that he never read the briefs at all, as he is known not to bother
consuming most of the written materials provided to him. Major points in the
PDB are delivered orally too, and the Post reports that the
coronavirus was in the oral summary at times. But Trump is also notorious for
not paying attention to briefings that are delivered to him, or for seizing
only on some small parts of them. (The president reportedly interrupted Azar’s January 18 briefing to
complain about Azar’s handling of vaping products.)
Even when
warnings are able to reach Trump, he seldom treats them as efforts to provide
him with useful information. It is clear now that the pandemic is a grave
political threat to Trump’s reelection, and that a swifter, more efficient
response would have placed him in much better stead in November. At times,
however, he has acted as though even discussing the crisis is evidence of
disloyalty, as demonstrated in his furious response to Messonnier’s warnings.
This is
the real context for the president’s infamous “hoax” remark at a rally in
February. Trump has complained that his adversaries are misconstruing him to
have claimed that the virus itself was a hoax. In fact, his remark was a
paranoiac insistence that any warnings about the outbreak could only be
intended to harm him politically: “They tried the impeachment hoax. That was on
a perfect conversation. They tried anything. They tried it over and over.
They’d been doing it since you got in. It’s all turning. They lost. It’s all
turning. Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax.”
But even
if Democrats’ motives were not completely pure—in addition to real worries,
they likely did see the virus as politically damaging to Trump—he would have
benefited from taking the warnings and acting.
What
would that action have looked like? The answer is not that Trump should have
micromanaged the crisis response—though that idea meshes with his own vision of
the presidency, which tends to emphasize actions the president can take
unilaterally. Perhaps the greatest power a president has is the power of the
bureaucracy. By picking up on currents in his briefings and asking a few
questions about them, a president can swing the great heft of the federal
bureaucracy toward them.
But Trump
has long since decided that federal employees are part of a “deep state”
determined to sink him, rather than the most powerful tool at his disposal. He
is resistant to new information, demanding that events respond to him, rather
than the other way around.
The
federal government is mighty enough that often a president can drive events,
but viruses don’t work like that. In a pandemic, the president has to respond
to events. Trump was too incurious and too paranoid to hear the warnings and do
so.
DAVID A.
GRAHAM is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
