President Trump Has Downplayed the Crisis Since the Beginning.
- On August 5, Trump claimed: “This thing’s going away. It will go away like things go away.”
- Trump on August 4 when asked about 150,000 Americans dying from the virus: “It is what it is.”
- On July 1, Trump claimed that the virus would “just disappear.”
- On June 17, Trump stated that, “The numbers are very minuscule compared to what it was. It’s dying out.”
- On May 15, Trump claimed that the virus would “go away at some point” while downplaying the need for a vaccine.
- Trump on April 28: “This is going to go away.”
- Through March 10, Trump insisted “Just stay calm. It will go away.”
- On February 28, Trump insisted that “One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear” and suggested that coronavirus was Democrats’ “new hoax.”
- On February 26, Trump wrongly claimed that coronavirus was like the regular flu and “we’ll essentially have a flu shot for this in a fairly quick manner.”
- On February 10, Trump insisted that the U.S. only had 11 cases of coronavirus and “most of them are getting better very rapidly.”
- On January 22, Trump described the coronavirus as “one person coming in from China.”
President Trump Has Politicized Agencies Meant to Keep Americans Safe.
- Trump ordered the CDC to adjust testing guidelines to exclude people without symptoms — despite the fact that almost half of transmission events may come from asymptomatic or presymptomatic individuals.
- Trump strong-armed the FDA into approving an Emergency Use Authorization for an unproven therapy, against the advice of experts.
- The CDC changed its school reopening recommendations just days after Trump bashed them as “very tough” and “expensive.”
- On July 15, the Trump administration ordered hospitals no longer send data to the C.D.C., a move that has alarmed health experts who fear the data will be politicized or withheld from the public.
- As Trump championed the drug, in March the FDA issued an Emergency Use Authorization for hydroxychloroquine, which it was later forced to revoke.
Trump Attacked & Silenced Experts While Pushing Misinformation, Junk Science
- Trump has repeatedly pushed for using hydroxychloroquine to treat covid patients despite warnings from experts that it is ineffective and at times deadly.
- On July 28, Trump shared a video from and later praised a doctor who has made bizarre claims about alien DNA, sex with demons and vaccinations that cause people not to be religious.
- Trump retweeted a post alleging a conspiracy “by Fauci & the Democrats to perpetuate Covid deaths to hurt Trump.”
- The White House released a statement attacking Dr. Anthony Fauci that resembled opposition research on a political opponent.”
- In May, the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force meetings were scaled back to once a week and the task force became mostly idle.
- In April, Trump suggested that injecting disinfectants like bleach could be a treatment for covid.
President’s Trump Failure to Control the Virus Led to Massive Unemployment and Economic Recession
- More than 58 million Americans have filed for unemployment since March.
- Under Trump’s tenure, the United States has experienced its worst economic downturn on record with GDP contracting by 32.9% during the second quarter of 2020.
- Trump’s inability to combat the virus caused more than 1.4 million small businesses to close since the pandemic began, and as many as 4 million could close forever by the end of 2020.
- Trump’s economic response to the pandemic has benefitted billionaires, banks, corporations, his donors and even Chinese owned companies — while shutting out Americans desperate for a lifeline.
President Trump Dropped the Ball on Social Distancing — And Urged States to Open When They Were Not Ready
- Trump has pushed schools to reopen despite evidence pointing to the dangers to children and their families, and despite the fact that the United States has not yet controlled the virus. Clusters of cases have already rocked campuses that reopened at the President’s urging.
- States that were among the first to reopen at Trump’s urging experienced deadly summer surges, in stark contrast with those that were slow to lift restrictions.
- Trump let social distancing guidelines expire on April 30, as more than half of states moved to reopen despite no state meeting the administration’s guidelines for reopening.
- The White House waited until March 16 to issue social distancing guidelines, nearly two months after the first confirmed case of coronavirus in the United States.
- Epidemiologists estimate that 90 percent of cumulative deaths in the U.S. during the first wave of Covid-19 could have been avoided if social distancing guidelines had been implemented just two
President Trump Refused to Shore Up Supplies of Protective Equipment
- Trump’s sparing use of the Defense Production act left frontline workers struggling to protect themselves throughout the pandemic.
- A July 10 administration briefing noted that states had only received a fraction of the PPE requested to fight the pandemic.
- The Trump administration and FEMA routinely sent damaged, expired, or otherwise useless PPE to states struggling to get the virus under control.
- In June, a National Nurses United survey found that 87% of 23,000 respondents were forced to reuse single use N95 respirators.
- Trump waited until mid-March — after hospitals were already out of N95 masks and ventilators — to start bulk ordering crucial medical supplies.
- Trump allowed US medical supplies to be exported to other countries as the national stockpile became depleted.
- In February, after the virus was circulating and despite warnings about its severity, President Trump tried to slash the budget request to buy respirator masks and other supplies for the national stockpile by 75%.
- On February 7, Trump’s State Department allowed 17.8 tons of medical supplies to be sent to China on the same day that the World Health Organization was warning of global shortage.
President Trump Failed to Scale Up Testing
- In mid-August, the average number of daily tests conducted in the United States dropped by 20,000 from just two weeks early, and by late August the country was only testing at 52% of levels recommended by experts.
- In July, as cases surged, people were forced to wait weeks for test results — rendering them useless.
- In July, when cases were surging across the south, labs were rationing tests and vying for critical testing materials that were in short supply.
- Trump refused to invoke the Defense Production Act to increase supplies of testing materials like swabs until April 19th, weeks after shortages were first reported.
- Trump’s promise of drive-through testing centers never materialized — the administration ultimately only set up 78 sites instead of the thousands promised.
- Eight weeks after its first infection, South Korea tested nearly 300,000 people. The United States only reported testing 56,000 people in the same time frame.
- When the CDC finally began its own testing regimen, the tests didn’t work and were restricted only to those who had been to China or who had had known exposure to the virus.
- The Trump administration declined to use the diagnostic tests offered by the World Health Organization, allowing cases to spread unidentified across the country.
President Trump Took Action That Exposed Americans and the World to the Risk of a Pandemic
- Two months before the coronavirus struck Wuhan, China, President Trump ended a pandemic early-warning program specifically designed to detect and respond to coronaviruses.
- Months before the first infections, President Trump eliminated a key CDC position focused on detecting disease outbreaks in China and cut the staff at the Beijing office of the CDC by two thirds.
- Trump downsized the CDC’s epidemic prevention activities in 39 countries — reducing efforts to prevent global disease outbreaks by 80%.
- Trump disbanded a National Security Council pandemic response unit in 2018.
President Trump Ignored Several Warnings About the Virus’ Severity
- Trump ignored a 69-page pandemic playbook that encouraged the government to undertake a federal-wide effort to procure supplies and detect outbreaks before things worsened.
- Trump ignored warnings from US Intelligence agencies in January and February about the global danger posed by the novel coronavirus.
- Trump ignored warnings from White House economists in 2019 that a pandemic could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans and devastate the economy.
- Trump ignored an October 2019 report that “drove home just how underfunded, underprepared and uncoordinated the federal government would be for a life-or-death battle with a virus for which no treatment existed.”
- Trump ignored Pentagon warnings about the threat of a new virus — and how unprepared the country was to face one — since 2017.
Read the Background Document HERE