The first recorded case of covid in the US was in January 2020. A few weeks later Judd Legum at Popular Information posted on Twitter, “I feel like more people should be talking about the fact that Trump fired the entire pandemic response team two years ago and then didn’t replace them.”
Indeed, the Trump administration gutted the infectious disease defense infrastructure through shortsighted cost-cutting measures starting in 2018 — a year after passing a trillion-dollar tax giveaway for his billionaire buddies. The administration specifically canned the executive branch team that would’ve coordinated a response.
Trump then spent most of February 2020 minimizing covid’s threat. He called the coronavirus Democrats’ “new hoax” at a campaign rally in South Carolina. By April, when everything was going to hell, he lamented that the pandemic was “something that nobody expected.” However, former President George W. Bush had warned in 2005 that “if we wait for a pandemic to appear, it will be too late to prepare.” Bush compared a pandemic to a forest fire: "If caught early it might be extinguished with limited damage. If allowed to smolder, undetected, it can grow to an inferno that can spread quickly beyond our ability to control it.”
Bush paved the way for pandemic planning, which the Obama administration continued. Only Trump was simultaneously arrogant and stupid enough to demolish what his predecessors had built.
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Trump wasn’t simply in over his head with the pandemic. He was willfully, maddeningly obstructive and resistant to the most basic mitigation measures.
On April 3, 2020, during one of his covid pressers, Trump grudgingly reported that the CDC advised “the use of non-medical cloth face covering as an additional voluntary public health measure.” Then he outright dismissed this guidance: “So it’s voluntary. You don’t have to do it. They suggested for a period of time, but this is voluntary. I don’t think I’m going to be doing it.”
Public Notice
So his MAGA minions proceeded to harrass everyone who did.
Originally casting himself as a wartime president, he soon offloaded any actual responsibility to individual states and declared that the federal government would only serve as “backup.” The lack of a centralized federal response resulted in a fragmented approach to the pandemic that differed based solely on regional politics rather than science.
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[T]he Trump administration had dismissed a national pandemic plan as bad politics. It was deemed preferable to let the virus rage through blue states — where it was disproportionately killing people of color — and blame the Democratic governors. Trump’s advisers had to tell him directly that the virus was hurting “our people” — white MAGA voters in Republican-run states.
Trump was rightly mocked for his bizarre press conference on April 23, 2020, when he suggested injecting people with disinfectant (not specifically bleach!) or maybe UV light.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
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