When you have 15
Trump keeps saying nobody knew. People did know. People around him knew, and they told him.
On Tuesday, Axios published internal White House memos that make the statements from President Donald Trump downplaying the coronavirus before it became a full-blown crisis look even more willfully ignorant.
[In] A February 23 memo labeled as a “MEMORANDUM TO PRESIDENT” sent through the National Security Agency, then-acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, and the Covid-19 task force warns in its very first sentence that “[t]here is an increasing probability of a full-blown COVID-19 pandemic that could infect as many as 100 million Americans, with a loss of life of as many as 1-2 million souls.”
Three days later, however, Trump held a news conference in which he suggested the coronavirus would soon go away on its own in the United States.
“When you have 15 [coronavirus cases], and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done,” Trump said.
This is the problem with putting a conceited ignorant corrupt incompetent in the White House.
The memo said stock up on ventilators and PPE now, as a matter of urgency. Trump of course never read it, because he never reads anything.
The Associated Press’s Michael Biesecker reported on Sunday that a review of federal purchasing contracts “shows federal agencies largely waited until mid-March to begin placing bulk orders of N95 respirator masks, mechanical ventilators and other equipment needed by front-line health care workers.”
“By that time, hospitals in several states were treating thousands of infected patients without adequate equipment and were pleading for shipments from the Strategic National Stockpile,” Biesecker added. When asked about the federal government’s slow response, Trump’s line has been that the states should have done more on their own.
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Then, during a Fox & Friends interview on March 30, Trump said of the coronavirus pandemic that “nobody could have predicted something like this.” But the memos indicate Trump’s own advisers had not only anticipated it but tried to warn him about it.
Nobody could have except everybody.
I’m sure that Trump would insist that the reports weren’t predictions, they were just guesses. I can hear him now; “Look, it clearly says ‘could’ infect. ‘Could’ is a guess word. A prediction would say ‘will’ infect. ‘Will’ is a prediction word. Prediction is a big word, nobody knrw that word before. I said it. Obama thought that nobody would be infected which is why he left us with obsolete and faulty tests. Now we have the best tests….”
Scary how easy it is to predict…erm….guess what Trump will say in any given situation.
So Trump decided to write, direct and star in a sequel to the famous August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US with many more locations, and an even bigger cast of fatalities. And look at those ratings! It put him to #1 on Facebook!! Not bad for the common cold!!!
“Anyway, 1-2 million is a wide spread. 2 million is a bigly big number, but one? One is even smallerer than fifteen.” as Trump might have said if he’d actually bothered to have someone read the report to him.