Trump repeatedly warned about virus, 'failed to register' threat

US intelligence officials warned President Donald Trump about the threat of Covid-19 in at least a dozen classified briefings in January and February, but he ignored those repeated warnings, The Washington Post reported.

Monday's development adds yet another layer to previous media reports that revealed the extent to which intelligence and administration officials sounded the alarm about an impending pandemic, which the president largely dismissed until US cases began surging in March.

According to The Post, the President's Daily Brief, or PDB, tracked the spread of the coronavirus around the world for weeks in January and February, and made clear that China was concealing the severity of the outbreak within its borders, where it first originated.

But despite the repeated warnings officials conveyed in the PDB, Trump "failed to register" the threat, The Post reported. The president is known to regularly skip reading through the PDB, and he reportedly doesn't have much patience even when the information is conveyed to him via oral summaries a few times per week.

By the end of January and beginning of February, a majority of the intelligence contained in Trump's daily briefings was about the coronavirus, The Post reported last month. At the same time that he was getting those briefings, the president was publicly downplaying the risk of the virus.

"The system was blinking red," one US official with access to the intelligence told The Post. "Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were — they just couldn't get him to do anything about it."

Some of the warnings came even earlier. Days before Trump's inauguration, Obama administration officials briefed Trump officials on how to respond to a pandemic, Politico reported. The hypothetical scenario Obama officials presented to the incoming administration bore many similarities to the coronavirus outbreak.

When asked whether any information from the session made its way to the president-elect, a former senior Trump administration official wasn't sure but said hypotheticals like that were not "the kind of thing that really interested the president very much."

Politico also reported that the Trump administration declined to use a nearly 70-page pandemic playbook that the NSC's health unit put together under the Obama administration. The document instructed federal officials on how to prepare for many of the same obstacles the Trump administration is now facing, including medical equipment shortages and a lack of coordination.

The US president spent the early weeks of the outbreak insisting there was nothing to worry about, and that warnings about a potential pandemic were a "hoax" meant to hurt his re-election bid and tank the stock market.

(Source: Washington Post/Business Insider)

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