Poll of the Day > Trump administration were trained for handling a pandemic; ignored it

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Seven days before Donald Trump took office, his aides faced a major test: the rapid, global spread of a dangerous virus in cities like London and Seoul, one serious enough that some countries were imposing travel bans.

The briefing was intended to hammer home a new, terrifying reality facing the Trump administration, and the incoming presidents responsibility to protect Americans amid a crisis. But unlike the coronavirus pandemic currently ravaging the globe, this 2017 crisis didnt really happen it was among a handful of scenarios presented to Trumps 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.
But roughly two-thirds of the Trump representatives in that room are no longer serving in the administration. That extraordinary turnover in the months and years that followed is likely one reason his administration has struggled to handle the very real pandemic it faces now, former Obama administration officials said.

In a Friday op-ed, Susan Rice, Obamas national security adviser, blasted Trump for comments such as you can never really think that a pandemic like the coronavirus is going to happen. She mentioned the 2017 session as one of many instances of the Obama administrations efforts to help its successor be ready for such a challenge. She also slammed the Trump team for dismantling the National Security Council section that would play a lead role in organizing the U.S. response to a global pandemic.

Asked whether information about the pandemic exercise reached the president-elect, a former senior Trump administration official who attended the meeting couldnt say for sure but noted that it wasnt the kind of thing that really interested the president very much.
He was never interested in things that might happen. Hes totally focused on the stock market, the economy and always bashing his predecessor and giving him no credit, the person said. The possibility things were things he didnt spend much time on or show much interest in.
Even though we would put time on the schedule for things like that, if they happened at all, they would be very, very brief, the former official continued. To get the president to be focused on something like this would be quite hard.
Anything associated with Obama or his administration was also a no-go zone for Trump aides. If you brought them up, that would be an immediate rejection, like, Why are they even here? Why the fuck did you ask them?