“No one could have anticipated this problem and need”, said the ‘wartime president’.

Not entirely true, since before Trump’s inauguration, his incoming-team received a half-day, legally-required transition-exercise, by an outgoing Obama-team.  The preparedness-session presented several scenarios focused on the threats of hurricanes, cyber-attacks, and a potential pandemic.  The Trump-team were told it “could face specific challenges such as a shortage of ventilators, anti-viral drugs and other essential medical equipment — that having a coordinated, unified response was paramount to any president’s responsibility to protect Americans amid a crises”.  So, in light of that information, how was it possible that the Trump administration, in 2018, dismantled  the Executive-branch team responsible for coordinating a response to a pandemic and did not replace it?  And why did the Trump-budget propose less and less money each year (even though Congress didn’t follow those proposals) for Centers of Disease Control?  Under Trump, in 2019, the National Security Council’s global health security office was dismantled.  How can president Trump claim to have no knowledge of that?    Remember when Trump fired hundreds of U.S. scientists last year and decimated USDA research?  Then there was Trump’s unnecessary trade-wars, which shut our farmers out of markets, and slowed or stopped our receiving crucial medical supplies and other necessities manufactured in China?

Trump declared Coronavirus a hoax; as his friends at Fox GOP-TV repeated that lie.  Now Trump has said he, “always knew the Coronavirus was a pandemic long before it was declared”.   Trump seldom trusts the truth, being largely unacquainted with it; he “had decided that pandemics don’t occur often, so why keep many expensive employees on the government payroll”, when he had better designs on that money.  One reason for the failure of the Trump-team to take that 1/13/17 preparedness-briefing seriously is that “two-thirds of the Trump representatives involved in that presentation are no longer serving — extraordinary turnovers in the months and years that followed” has hollowed-out essential staff at the White House.  John Bolton, Trump’s third (having fired the two previous) National Security Advisor, “oversaw the dissolution of the National Security Council’s global health security & biodefense section”.  Continuity and competence matters in government!  We build on successes.  The Trump-team struggles to adequately handle the very real pandemic it faces now, and we, Americans, face an unnecessarily botched response to this crises: no testing, no vaccines, no scientists.   American Carnage!   America is shutting down, our economy is crashing around us.          Who’s winning now?     “Nero fiddled while Rome burned.”    Or did he golf?

Trish Forsyth Voss