how Trump killed thousands of Americans.

 

 On July 17, President Donald Trump sat for a Fox News interview at the White House.  At the time, nearly 140,000 Americans were dead from the novel coronavirus.  The interviewer, Chris Wallace, showed Trump a video clip in which Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned of a difficult fall and winter ahead.  Trump dismissed the warning.  He scoffed that experts had misjudged the virus all along.  “Everybody thought this summer it would go away,” said Trump.  “They used to say the heat, the heat was good for it and it really knocks it out, remember?  So they got that one wrong. ”

 Trump’s account was completely backward.  Redfield and other U.S. public health officials had never promised that heat would knock out the virus.  In fact, they had cautioned against that assumption.  The person who had held out the false promise of a warm-weather reprieve, again and again, was Trump.  And he hadn’t gotten the idea from any of his medical advisers.  He had gotten it from Xi Jinping, the president of China, in a phone call in February.

 The phone call, the talking points Trump picked up from it, and his subsequent attempts to cover up his alliance with Xi are part of a deep betrayal.  The story the president now tells — that he “built the greatest economy in history,” that China blindsided him by unleashing the virus, and that Trump saved millions of lives by mobilizing America to defeat it — is a lie.  Trump collaborated with Xi, concealed the threat, impeded the U.S. government’s response, silenced those who sought to warn the public, and pushed states to take risks that escalated the tragedy.  He’s personally responsible for tens of thousands of deaths.

This isn’t speculation.  All the evidence is in the public record.  But the truth, unlike Trump’s false narrative, is scattered in different places.  It's in emails, leaks, interviews, hearings, scientific reports, and the president's stray remarks.  This article puts those fragments together.  It documents Trump’s interference or negligence in every stage of the government’s failure: preparation, mobilization, public communication, testing, mitigation, and reopening.

 Trump has always been malignant and incompetent.  As president, he has coasted on economic growth, narrowly warned crises of his own making, and corrupted the government in ways that many Americans could ignore.  But in the pandemic, his vices — venality, dishonesty, self-absorption, dereliction, heedlessness — turned deadly.  They produced lies, misjudgments, and destructive interventions that multiplied the carnage.  The coronavirus debacle isn’t, as Trump protests, an “artificial problem” that spoiled his presidency.  It’s the fulfillment of everything he is.

 Trump never prepared for a pandemic.  For years, he had multiple warnings — briefings, reports, simulations, intelligence assessments — that a crisis such as this one was likely and that the government wasn’t ready for it.  In April, he admitted that he was informed of the risks: “I always knew that pandemics are one of the worst things that could happen.”  But when the virus arrived, the federal government was still ill-equipped to deal with it.  According to Trump, “We had no ventilators.  We had no testing.  We had nothing. ”

 That’s an exaggeration.  But it’s true that the stockpile of pandemic supplies was depleted and that the government’s system for producing virus tests wasn’t designed for such heavy demand.  So why, for the first three years of his presidency, did Trump do nothing about it?  He often brags that he spent $ 2 trillion to beef up the military.  But he squeezed the budget for pandemics, disbanded the federal team in charge of protecting the country from biological threats, and stripped down the Beijing office of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Trump has been asked several times to explain these decisions.  He has given two answers.  One is that he wanted to save money.  “Some of the people we cut, they haven’t been used for many, many years,” he said in February.  “If we have a need, we can get them very quickly.  ... I’m a businessperson.  I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them. ”

 His second answer is that he had other priorities.  In March, at a Fox News town hall, Bret Baier asked Trump why he hadn’t updated the test production system.  “I'm thinking about a lot of other things, too, like trade,” Trump replied.  “I’m not thinking about this.”  In May, ABC’s David Muir asked him, “What did you do when you became president to restock those cupboards that you say were bare?”  Trump gave the same answer: “I have a lot of things going on.”

 Trump prepared for a war, not for a virus.  He wagered that if a pandemic broke out, he could pull together the resources to contain it quickly.  He was wrong.  But that was just the first of many mistakes.

 In early January, Trump was warned about a deadly new virus in China.  He was also told that the Chinese government was understating the outbreak.  (See this timeline for a detailed chronology of what Trump knew and when he knew it.) This was inconvenient, because Trump was about to sign a lucrative trade deal with Beijing.  “We have a great relationship with China right now, so I don’t want to speak badly of anyone,” Trump told Laura Ingraham in a Fox News interview on Jan.  10. He added that he was looking forward to a second deal with Xi.  When Ingraham asked about China’s violations of human rights, Trump begged off.  “I'm riding a fine line because we're making… great trade deals,” he pleaded.

Trump signed the deal on Jan.  15. He lauded Xi and said previous American presidents, not Xi, were at fault for past troubles between the two countries.  Three days later, Alex Azar, Trump’s secretary of health and human services, phoned him with an update on the spread of the novel coronavirus.  On Jan.  21, the CDC announced the first infection in the United States.  Two of the government’s top health officials — Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases — said the virus was beginning to circulate around the world.

 Trump would later claim that he saw from the outset how grim the situation was.  That was clear, he recalled, in the “initial numbers coming out from China.”  But at the time, he told Americans everything was fine.  “We're in great shape,” he assured Maria Bartiromo in a Fox Business interview on Jan.  22. “China’s in good shape, too.”  He preferred to talk about trade instead.  “The China deal is amazing, and we’ll be starting Phase Two very soon,” he said.  On CNBC, Joe Kernen asked Trump whether there were any “worries about a pandemic.”  “No, not at all,” the president replied.  “We have it totally under control.”  When Kernen asked whether the Chinese were telling the whole truth about the virus, Trump said they were.  “I have a great relationship with President Xi,” he boasted.  “We just signed probably the biggest deal ever made.”

The crisis in China grew.  In late January, Trump’s medical advisers agreed with his national security team that he should suspend travel from China to the United States.  But Trump resisted.  He had spent months cultivating a relationship with Xi and securing the trade deal.  He was counting on China to buy American goods and boost the U.S. economy, thereby helping him win reelection.  He had said this to Xi explicitly, in a conversation witnessed by then – National Security Adviser John Bolton.  Trump also worried that a travel ban would scare the stock market.  But by the end of the month, airlines were halting flights to China anyway.  On Jan.  31, Trump gave in.

 His advisers knew the ban would only buy time.  They wanted to use that time to fortify America.  But Trump had no such plans.  On Feb.  1, he recorded a Super Bowl interview with Sean Hannity.  Hannity pointed out that the number of known infections in the United States had risen to eight, and he asked Trump whether he was worried.  The president brushed him off.  “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China,” said Trump.  That was false: Thanks to loopholes in the ban, the coronavirus strain that would engulf Washington state arrived from China about two weeks later.  But at the time of the interview, the ban hadn’t even taken effect.  The important thing, to Trump, was that he had announced the ban.  He was less interested in solving the problem than in looking as though he had solved it.  And in the weeks to come, he would argue that the ban had made other protective measures unnecessary.

 There were three logical steps to consider after suspending travel from China.  The first was suspending travel from Europe.  By Jan.  21, Trump’s advisers knew the virus was in France.  By Jan.  31, they knew it had reached Italy, Germany, Finland, and the United Kingdom.  From conversations with European governments, they also knew that these governments, apart from Italy, weren’t going to block travel from China.  And they were directly informed that the flow of passengers from Europe to the United States far exceeded the normal flow of passengers from China to the United States.  Trump’s deputy national security adviser, Matthew Pottinger, pleaded for a ban on travel from Europe, but other advisers said this would hurt the economy in an election year.  Trump, persuaded by Pottinger’s opponents, refused to go along.

 Not until March 11, six weeks after blocking travel from China, did Trump take similar action against Europe.  In a televised address, he acknowledged that travelers from Europe had brought the disease to America.  Two months later, based on genetic and epidemiological analyzes, the CDC would confirm that Trump's action had come too late, because people arriving from Europe — nearly 2 million of them in February, hundreds of whom were infected — had already accelerated the spread of the virus in the United States.

 The second step was to gear up production of masks, ventilators, and other medical supplies.  In early February, trade adviser Peter Navarro, biomedical research director Rick Bright, and other officials warned of impending shortages of these supplies.  Azar would later claim that during this time, everyone in the administration was pleading for more equipment.  But when Azar requested $ 4 billion to stock up, the White House refused.  Trump dismissed the outcry for masks and ridiculed Democrats for “forcing money” on him to buy supplies.  “They say,‘ Oh, he should do more, ’” the president scoffed in an interview on Feb.  28. “There’s nothing more you can do.”

 The third and most important step was to test the population to see whether the virus was spreading domestically.  That was the policy of South Korea, the global leader in case detection.  Like the United States, South Korea had identified its first case on Jan.  20. But from there, the two countries diverged.  By Feb.  3 South Korea had expanded its testing program, and by Feb.  27 it was checking samples from more than 10,000 people a day.  The U.S. program, hampered by malfunctions and bureaucratic conflict, was nowhere near that.  By mid-February, it was testing only about 100 samples a day.  As a result, few infections were being detected.

 Fauci saw this as a grave vulnerability.  From Feb.  14 to March 11, he warned in a dozen hearings, forums, and interviews that the virus might be spreading “under the radar.”  But Trump wasn’t interested.  He liked having a low infection count — he bragged about it at rallies — and he understood that the official count would stay low if people weren’t tested.  Trump had been briefed on the testing situation since late January and knew test production was delayed.  But he insisted that “anybody that wants a test can get a test” and that “the tests are all perfect.”  Later, he brushed off the delay in test production and said it had been “quickly remedied.”  He complained that additional tests, by exposing additional cases, made him “look bad.”

 To keep the numbers low, Trump was willing to risk lives.  He figured that infections didn’t count if they were offshore, so he tried to prevent infected Americans from setting foot on American soil.  In mid-February, even as he refused to bar Europeans from entering the United States, he exploded in anger when more than a dozen infected Americans were allowed to return from Japan.  “I hated to do it, statistically,” he told Hannity.  “You know, is it going to look bad?”  In March, he opposed a decision to let passengers off a cruise ship in California.  “I'd rather have the people stay” offshore, he explained, “because I like the numbers being where they are.  I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship. ”

 When the spread of the virus in the United States could no longer be denied, Trump called it the “invisible enemy.”  But Trump had kept it invisible.  The CDC would later acknowledge that due to woefully insufficient testing, the overwhelming majority of infections had gone undiagnosed.  Models would show that by mid-February, there were hundreds of undetected infections in the United States for every known case.  By the end of the month, there were thousands.

 Trump didn’t just ignore warnings.  He suppressed them.  When Azar briefed him about the virus in January, Trump called him an “alarmist” and told him to stop panicking.  When Navarro submitted a memo about the oncoming pandemic, Trump said he shouldn’t have put his words in writing.  As the stock market rose in February, Trump discouraged aids from saying anything about the virus that might scare investors.

 The president now casts himself as a victim of Chinese deception.  In reality, he collaborated with Xi to deceive both the Chinese public and the American public.  For weeks after he was briefed on the situation in China, including the fact that Beijing was downplaying the crisis, Trump continued to deny that the Chinese government was hiding anything.  He implied that American experts had been welcomed in China and could vouch for Beijing's information, which — as he would acknowledge months later — wasn’t true.  On Twitter, Trump wrote tributes worthy of Chinese state propaganda.  “Great discipline is taking place in China, as President Xi strongly leads what will be a very successful operation,” he proclaimed.