“What did the President know and when did he know it?” is among the most famous quotes from the Watergate hearings—and it’s become the definitional question of the current crisis.
The New York Times has published a timeline detailing the intelligence reports about the coronavirus waved off by Donald Trump and his economic advisors going back as early as January. It shows an administration consistent in putting the interests of Wall Street ahead of the interests of public health, a struggle still raging as Trump decides when to ease restrictions on social distancing and reopen the economy.
The National Center for Medical Intelligence, part of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Department were sounding the alarm about the virus spreading from Wuhan, China in early January. The Times reports that Trump’s economic advisors tamped down their reports so as not to upset the negotiations of a trade deal with Beijing.
Later in January Peter Navarro, one of Trump’s top advisors, wrote a memo stating that a virus could cause trillions of dollars in damage and result in 500,000 deaths. It argued for swift travel limits with China.
Trump has denied seeing this memo, but reports show that Navarro’s concerns were indeed raised. The Times reported that Trump was displeased that Navarro had put his thoughts into writing.
In early February, public health officials in the Trump administration had put together a strategy that included social distancing, school closures and shelter-in-place suggestions, but were unable to present these to the president. The reason, it is believed, is due to Trump’s frustration at a Centers of Disease Control official who made public statements “too soon,” sending the stock market into a plunge.
As such, Trump did not recommend aggressive distancing measures for an additional three weeks. During this time, the virus spread virtually unimpeded in densely populated areas like New York, which, as of Sunday morning, has over 181,000 cases of Covid-19 and 8,650 confirmed deaths.
During these first two months of the year, a group of infectious disease experts and doctors, many of them within the Trump administration, were in a group email chain called Red Dawn, a reference to the John Milius film in which a group of teens band together to save America from an invasive threat. (Yes, this is likely the first time C. Thomas Howell has played a key role in public policy.)
According to the Times “the officials repeatedly expressed concern about the lack of aggressive action to deal with the virus.”
The wedge on how to deal with coronavirus between entrenched individuals working in public service, the so-called Deep State, and Donald Trump was finally acknowledged by the president when he yukked it up on March 20th, inspiring Dr. Anthony Fauci’s facepalm seen ‘round the world.
More Great Stories From Vanity Fair
— Silence in the Streets: Dispatches From New York City Under Lockdown
— How Private Equity Is Winning the Coronavirus Crisis
— Inside the Viral Spread of a Coronavirus Origin Theory
— Progressives Chafe at Nancy Pelosi’s Coronavirus Approach
— Mask Misinformation and the Failure of the Elites
— From the Archive: Revisiting Avian Flu, the Virus That Threatened Pandemic
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