Trump’s Coronavirus Response: ‘It Intentionally Was Never Under Control’
Nation lost more than 400,000 Americans during the former president's last year in office
Despite his bluster to the contrary, Donald Trump never truly had control over the COVID-19 pandemic which swept the world and ultimately caused more than 400,000 Americans to lose their lives in the last year of his presidency.
After his administration disbanded the White House pandemic response team and eliminated the position of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) epidemiologist embedded in China’s disease control agency, the nation suddenly faced a highly transmissible and deadly disease.
The response by both his administration — and Trump himself — was marked by inaction and misinformation.
Storied author and Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward called that poor, flailing response intentional.
Woodward’s analysis comes from 20 personal interviews Trump granted him during his years in the White House.
After initially dismissing the COVID threat — “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine,” — and even praising the pandemic response by China, Trump eventually seemed much more concerned about its impact on his political future.
He even misled the nation on the severity of the pandemic.
In one of those interviews with Woodward, Trump acknowledged, “It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flu... This is deadly stuff.”
But just days after that conversation behind closed doors in February 2020, Trump told the American people: “I think the virus is going to be—it’s going to be fine.”
By the time Trump left office in January 2021, the US death toll from COVID eclipsed 400,000.
“This idea of, ‘We have it under control,’ it was never under control. It intentionally was never under control,” Woodward told MSNBC host Ari Melber Friday. “And the problem with Trump is: I think he looks at democracy as enemy territory, to be quite frank, because that’s the people and he always wants it to be about him. And you listen to [Trump], and it’s all about, ‘Oh, no, no, no, everything is fine, I know what I’m doing.’ And when you lay it all out, he did not know what he was doing and he didn’t care.”
Woodward's analysis is not merely academic,or backwards-looking, as Trump is once again on the political stage as the frontrunner for the Republican nomination for president seeking a return to the Oval Office.
“Shows a negligence to a national security problem for the country, a national health problem,” Woodward said. “And it turns out in the reporting — and this is on tape — that national security adviser Robert O’Brien and his deputy, Matt Pottinger, went to Trump in early January, that’s the year that Trump is running for re-election. And O’Brien tells Trump, ‘The coming virus will be the biggest threat, be the biggest national security threat to your presidency.’”
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