Evidence Of Trump's Incompetence Mounts & Fauci is Now Confirming It

As Trump frantically attempts to shift the blame for his botched Covid-19 response, evidence continues to mount against the administration. Over the last week, a variety of media outlets have reported that Trump and his advisers were repeatedly warned about the threat that the virus posed to America. What's becoming clear is that the President's failure to heed those warnings and respond more aggressively is costing the nation dearly. Earlier action could have curbed the spread of the virus, and reduced its impact on the nation's health and economy.

Moreover, Trump's rather transparent attempts to shift the blame to China and the World Heath Organization are nothing more than smokescreens meant to maintain some level of deniability as his response faces greater scrutiny.

For instance, we now know that the National Security Council received specific and detailed warnings in early January and that Trump was briefed on the coming pandemic on Jan. 18th.

At the end of January, Trump's trade adviser, Peter Navarro, warned that a pandemic could cost the United States as many as "half a million deaths and trillions of dollars in economic losses."

Axios has a more detailed timeline here.and here. and the New York Times has more background on how and why the administration botched their response here. While experts in his administration were raising the alarm, Trump refused their advice and seemed more focused on how the government's response might impact the stock market.

Axios: "On Feb. 25, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, Nancy Messonnier publicly warned of the virus threat and said "we need to be preparing for significant disruption in our lives.” Trump reportedly called [HHS Secretary] Azar fuming that Messonnier had scared people unnecessarily and caused the stock market to plummet, per the [NY] Times."

Government health professionals and some administration officials realized that the nation was wasting valuable time to curb the inevitable onslaught of the virus and began to share their concerns in an email string they called "Red Dawn."

New York Times: "The officials repeatedly expressed concern about the lack of aggressive action to deal with the virus. They assailed the lack of testing and helped bring to the government’s attention concerns about the virus being spread by people without symptoms. They also tracked the global spread of the virus. At the end of February, a top Veterans Affairs Department doctor wrote, “So we have a relatively narrow window and we are flying blind. Looks like Italy missed it.”

But, even through March 9th, Trump was still arguing on Twitter that Covid-19 was less dangerous than the flu and that there was no need for special precautions like business and school closures and social distancing requirements.

Axios: "March 9: Trump tweets: “So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!”

And while other nations had started to produce and stockpile the supplies needed to fight the virus on or about January 20th when the first cases were reported in the United States and S. Korea, when the virus began its rampage through America in early March, the Trump administration was caught flat-footed without adequate test kits, ventilators or masks, and things have barely improved since.

Guardian: “The US response will be studied for generations as a textbook example of a disastrous, failed effort,” Ron Klain, who spearheaded the fight against Ebola in 2014, told a Georgetown university panel recently. “What’s happened in Washington has been a fiasco of incredible proportions.”...

..."Jeremy Konyndyk, who led the US government’s response to international disasters at USAid from 2013 to 2017, frames the past six weeks in strikingly similar terms. He told the Guardian: “We are witnessing in the United States one of the greatest failures of basic governance and basic leadership in modern times.”

"In Konyndyk’s analysis, the White House had all the information it needed by the end of January to act decisively. Instead, Trump repeatedly played down the severity of the threat, blaming China for what he called the “Chinese virus” and insisting falsely that his partial travel bans on China and Europe were all it would take to contain the crisis."

Donald Trump failed to keep Americans safe, and his top infectious disease specialist Anthony S. Fauci admitted as much yesterday.

Washington Post: "It followed an interview with National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases chief on CNN’s “State of the Union,” in which Fauci said a stronger early response by the administration to the outbreak “could have saved lives,” but also characterized the decision to implement social distancing guidelines as “complicated.”...

...Fauci also confirmed a New York Times story saying that he and other experts had wanted to begin social and physical distancing measures as early as February."

Trump will continue to blame others for his failures, it's what he has always done, but as more of the back-story leaks from the White House, even his most ardent supporters may find it difficult to keep the faith.

#news #coronavirus #Trump

By: Don Lam & Curated Content