This time, Donald Trump’s decisions are costing American lives. Congressional Republicans are complicit because they didn’t reign him in, and haven’t called him out.
He ignored two years of warnings that America was not equipped to handle a pandemic, that his approach would lead to the loss of lives, and that his ongoing cuts to our defenses would make America vulnerable to the “significant probability of a large and lethal modern-day pandemic.” Now the pandemic has hit, and we’ve never been less prepared, thanks to Trump’s actions and inactions.
In 2018, he fired Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert, who had called for a comprehensive biodefense strategy against pandemics. A month later, Trump’s National Security Council advisor John Bolton disbanded the entire team of Timothy Ziemer, Trump’s senior director for global health, and never replaced it. Dr. Luciana Borio, the NSC’s director for medical and biodefense preparedness, left in May 2018 and was also not replaced. Continue reading.