Why did Trump get Covid wrong? Because, yet again, he refused to listen. More than 12 times.
- On This Day In The Trump Administration
- Apr 27, 2024
- 1 min read
Updated: Apr 28, 2024
April 27: On This Day In 2020
In countries similar to the U.S., Covid death tolls were generally much lower than they were here. America had more advance warning than Europe that the virus was coming, yet Trump hampered our national response in several ways, including having closed the office of pandemic response, shrunk our emergency supply of PPE, and botched the distribution of supplies and medicines.
Yet Trump’s primary “excuse” was that he was as surprised as anybody about how quickly Covid could spread and how awful it would get.
He even complained that his intelligence advisors “only spoke of the Virus in a very non-threatening…manner.” In fact, he added, the US intelligence community was not “competently run.”
OTDI 2020, Trump’s ghastly lie was revealed by the Washington Post. They reported that Trump’s intelligence team tried to alert him to the growing threat posed by the coronavirus more than a dozen times in January and February 2020. (For example, see the Jan. 18 OTDI). These were even included in the all-important President’s Daily Brief (which, as has been reported, Trump often refused to bother reading).
So on March 10, a day the country was closing up shop in fear, he declared: “Just stay calm. It will go away.”
As we'll see in the May 15th OTDI, scientists report that Trump’s delay had a significant impact on the amount of death and misery in those early months. But Trump, of course, blamed others.
Dive Deeper
The Washington Post has the report
CNN coves Trump's response
Pic: OpenArt.ai
Summary: Trump ignores Covid experts, leading to more misery