I Forgot

Caitlin Oprysko of Politico: "... Donald Trump on Friday deflected blame for his administration's lagging ability to test Americans for the coronavirus outbreak, insisting instead -- without offering evidence -- that fault lies with his predecessor, Barack Obama. 'I don't take responsibility at all,' Trump said defiantly, pointing to an unspecified 'set of circumstances' and 'rules, regulations and specifications from a different time.'... Trump later got testy with another reporter who pressed him on whether he bore any responsibility for the surge in cases, noting that he'd disbanded the White House's pandemic office."

Washington Post (live update): "When pressed by Yamiche Alcindor, the White House correspondent for PBS NewsHour, about the White House dismantling the office on pandemics, he called the question 'nasty' and suggested that Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, knew something he didn't. 'I didn't do it,' [Trump] said. 'I could perhaps ask Tony about that because I don't know anything about it. I mean you say we did that but I don't know anything about it.' Fauci, who works under the National Institutes of Health, does not have purview over the National Security Council, which the team worked for."

Trump's full exchange with Alcindor is pretty remarkable. And of course he called her question "nasty." She's a black woman, for Pete's sake. Alcindor said later on MSNBC that she had a follow-up response/question for Trump, but the White House had cut her mic.

What's more remarkable is that Trump tried to deflect a question about the National Security Council to Fauci, who is not on the NSC. Trump, on the other hand, is chair of the NSC. He's the guy. "I didn't do it, ask Tony" is an insane response. Alcindor asked the right question of the right guy.

As Lena Sun of the Washington Post reported in May 2018, "The top White House official responsible for leading the U.S. response in the event of a deadly pandemic has left the administration, and the global health security team he oversaw has been disbanded under a reorganization by national security adviser John Bolton. The abrupt departure of Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer from the National Security Council means no senior administration official is now focused solely on global health security. Ziemer's departure, along with the breakup of his team, comes at a time when many experts say the country is already underprepared for the increasing risks of a pandemic or bioterrorism attack."

As it turns out, Trump has been asked this same question before, and recently. Then he had very different answers, answers that suggest he knew damned well his office had disbanded the global pandemic team.

"Who would have thought?" Who could have known getting rid of advisors responsible for monitoring, reporting & coordinating response to an international pandemic would be a problem? Way last week (March 7), Trump himself explained that this whole "foreign virus" thing was a big surprise. A reporter asked him if he would rethink having an office of pandemic preparation in the White House. Trump's response: "I just think this is something, Peter, that you can never really think is going to happen.... I think we're doing a really good job in this country at keeping it down. We've really been very vigilant, and we've done a tremendous job at keeping to down. But who would have thought? Look, how long ago is it? Six, seven, eight weeks ago -- who would have thought we would even be having the subject? We were going to hit 30,000 on the Dow like it was clockwork. Right? It was all going -- it was right up, and then all of a sudden, this came out.... And the thing is, you never really know when something like this is going to strike and what it's going to be. This is different than something else. This is a very different thing than something else."

So Trump seemed to know -- less than a week before -- that he had disbanded the global health security office. He knew he did it because he figured he would get lucky and there would be no pandemics on his watch. I mean, nobody can predict the future; nobody can predict a thing that's "very different than something else."

Besides, as he had already explained, getting rid of the global health team was a good business decision. And it would never be a problem. He could reassemble the team "very quickly":

On February 26, a reporter asked Trump if his "enormous cuts to the CDC, the NIH, and the WHO' gave him pause now that the country was confronted by a major health crisis. Trump's response: "No, because we -- we can get money and we can increase staff. We know all the people. We know all the good people. It's a question I asked the doctors before. Some of the people we cut, they haven't been used for many, many years. And if -- if we have a need, we can get them very quickly. And rather than spending the money -- and I'm a business person -- I don't like having thousands of people around when you don't need them. When we need them, we can get them back very quickly."

This isn't true. Beth Reinhard & others of the Washington Post reported (Feb. 27), "Former USAID official Jeremy Konyndyk, who helped lead the U.S. response to the Ebola outbreak and other international disasters during the Obama administration, said recruiting people with the specialized skills to handle an infectious-disease crisis is difficult.... Cyrus Shahpar, a physician who served at the CDC under Obama and worked on the agency's global rapid-response team during the first year of the Trump administration..., [said] it is not easy to persuade a lot of people with specialized skills to suddenly shift to federal service to help respond to a threat.... 'They have stable jobs with retirement plans,' he said. 'They are not going to quit their job at the university or quit their job in the local government to go join the U.S. federal government for six months because of coronavirus. It doesn't work like that.' In November 2019, a commission on health security that included Republican and Democratic members of Congress warned that 'the American people are far from safe.'"

So a week ago, and two weeks ago, Trump not only knew he had axed the global health security team, he produced a number of "reasons" as to why that was a smart idea: nobody can predict a pandemic, the team was just sitting around doing nothing but collecting paychecks, they would come right back to work if he called them. But by Friday, he forgot all that. By Friday, his past decisions were another excuse to insult a black woman.

Comments

[PD Pepe]

"Trump's full exchange with Alcindor is pretty remarkable. And of course he called her "nasty." She's a black woman, for Pete's sake. Alcindor said later on MSNBC that she had a follow-up response/question for Trump, but the White House had cut her mic."

Trump didn't actually call Alcindor nasty, he said her "question was nasty," but after thinking about this I think you are right as rain, Marie, for two reasons.

One: Who refers to a question as "nasty?"
Two: Being a black woman, fatty sees "nasty" if she has the audacity to question him the way she did. He probably also envisioned blood coming from her wherever.

I think it was Tony Schwartz, one of the authors of books ghost written for Fatty, who told us that during all his time with Trump, not once did he concede that he was wrong and there were plenty of instances where he had gotten facts wildly incorrect. "He will never apologize for anything" and then Tony added, "As a president this is dangerous."

Another ringing non- endorsement from those that knew then and warned us. Who knew we had so many with clogged ear wax or/and had such a desperate need to be a player in this game of palace intrigue and pure applesauce. And now we have come to this.

[Marie Burns]

@PD Pepe: You're right. I corrected my remark in the body of the page.

[Patrick]

"... And the thing is, you never really know when something like this is going to strike and what it’s going to be."

Which is exactly why you need "preparedness" Global Pandemic leadership at the White House level. The USG has for decadees known that a novel pandemic will come out of somewhere and hop on a jet for Yourtown USA. The Q is not "if", but "when" and "how bad."

Like you need a fire house at the city level

EMTs; HAZMAT crews; accident investigators; hospital emergency rooms; etc.

When you are paying them to exist, they are doing their job. You don't need to have your house on fire to think that it's a good idea to have a ladder company within 5 minutes drive, even if all you've ever seen them do is wash their units.

I'm sure that DiJiT really had no idea that the pandemic operation in the NSC was dismantled. If he saw it in a list of cuts he would have forgotten about it in a nanosecond. But the people who did it were following his general guidance, eliminating WH components that were responsible for things that POTUS* is not interested in. A lot of that was executing government cuts sought for years by the American Enterprise Institute, whose objectives were adopted in great part by the Trump "transition."