Trump Transition Team Was Uninterested In Obama Planning To Battle the 'Worst Epidemic Since 1918'
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Tuesday March 17, 2020 · 3:29 AM CDT
During the transition, Trump cabinet officials and other aides were given a three hour brief and a hypothetical exercise in responding to a global epidemic.
Detailed briefing books were prepared by Obama administration officials for scenarios like this and others. They were later found in the trash.
As Politico reports, incoming Trump administration officials gave Obama officials a big “meh.” Consequently, coupled with the tremendous turnover during the tumultuous Trump’s presidency, the U.S. was unprepared, by choice, to to meet the challenge of this very real global epidemic that has beleaguered America.
In a tabletop exercise days before an untested new president took power, officials briefed the incoming administration on a scenario remarkably like the one he faces now.
The briefing was intended to hammer home a new, terrifying reality facing the Trump administration, and the incoming president’s responsibility to protect Americans amid a crisis. But unlike the coronavirus pandemic currently ravaging the globe, this 2017 crisis didn’t really happen — it was among a handful of scenarios presented to Trump’s top aides as part of a legally required transition exercise with members of the outgoing administration of Barack Obama.
…
POLITICO obtained documents from the meeting and spoke with more than a dozen attendees to help provide the most detailed reconstruction of the closed-door session yet. It was perhaps the most concrete and visible transition exercise that dealt with the possibility of pandemics, and top officials from both sides — whether they wanted to be there or not — were forced to confront a whole-of-government response to a crisis. The Trump team was told it could face specific challenges, such as shortages of ventilators, anti-viral drugs and other medical essentials, and that having a coordinated, unified national response was “paramount” — warnings that seem eerily prescient given the ongoing coronavirus crisis.
Susan Rice had this to say about this January 2017 meeting and the reasons we now find ourselves facing likely mass infection in the U.S.
“Rather than heed the warnings, embrace the planning and preserve the structures and budgets that had been bequeathed to him, the president ignored the risk of a pandemic,” Rice wrote. (Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton, who oversaw the dissolution of the NSC’s global health security and biodefense section, has defended it as necessary streamlining, countering that global health “remained a top NSC priority.” Trump, when recently asked about the reshuffling, called the question “nasty” and said, “I don’t know anything about it.”)
The story is another example of the unforced errors and nonchalance that led to threats we now face. Probably ‘because Obama.’ This event precedes Trump’s disbanding of the Pandemic Response Unit at the NSC.
Thanks to the arrogant attitudes and inaction, the dangerous clown show Trump and his aides have made of their (oh, the irony) ‘pandemic response’ has put us all in danger.
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