Donald Trump reportedly ignored more than a dozen warnings from his own intelligence community about the threat posed by the coronavirus, a disease that has now caused more than 50,000 deaths in the United States.
According to The Washington Post, “U.S. intelligence agencies issued warnings about the novel coronavirus in more than a dozen classified briefings prepared for President Trump in January and February, months during which he continued to play down the threat, according to current and former U.S. officials.”
The report noted that the dire warnings didn’t even faze Trump, which is possibly because he “routinely skips reading” his daily briefings altogether.
More from The Washington Post:
The repeated warnings were conveyed in issues of the President’s Daily Brief, a sensitive report that is produced before dawn each day and designed to call the president’s attention to the most significant global developments and security threats.
For weeks, the PDB — as the report is known — traced the virus’s spread around the globe, made clear that China was suppressing information about the contagion’s transmissibility and lethal toll, and raised the prospect of dire political and economic consequences.
But the alarms appear to have failed to register with the president, who routinely skips reading the PDB and has at times shown little patience even for the oral summary he now takes two or three times per week, according to the officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified material.
Trump’s incompetence, laziness and obsession with politics cost thousands of American lives
Trump has spent weeks playing damage control over his failed response to this health crisis, but nothing will paper over just how costly his incompetence has been.
Roughly as many Americans have now died from the coronavirus in the span of a couple months than in the 20-year war in Vietnam. The United States has – by far – the highest number of reported deaths and infections of any country in the world.
That’s in no small part because Trump – a man who wants the title of president without actually doing the work – failed to take this threat seriously and act swiftly. And once he did finally accept that it was a crisis, he spent more time playing politics than combatting the outbreak.
Donald Trump’s incompetence, laziness and obsession with politics is directly responsible for the severity of the coronavirus outbreak in the United States.
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