One of the issues Donald Trump can’t keep straight is when he and his administration began to take the coronavirus threat seriously. His story keeps changing, and whenever anyone points that out, he throws an orange tantrum. By most accounts, Trump and the White House basically did nothing in February besides send some people out to lie on news shows and say that the coronavirus was all one big hoax and that it will disappear in a month. But what was happening behind the scenes?

U.S. intelligence agencies issued warnings about the novel coronavirus in more than a dozen classified briefings prepared for President Trump in January and February, months during which he continued to play down the threat, according to current and former U.S. officials. The repeated warnings were conveyed in issues of the President’s Daily Brief, a sensitive report that is produced before dawn each day and designed to call the president’s attention to the most significant global developments and security threats.

For weeks, the PDB — as the report is known — traced the virus’s spread around the globe, made clear that China was suppressing information about the contagion’s transmissibility and lethal toll, and raised the prospect of dire political and economic consequences. But the alarms appear to have failed to register with the president, who routinely skips reading the PDB and has at times shown little patience for even the oral summary he takes two or three times per week, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified material.

[From WaPo]

This reminds me of the Bush-era PDB dated August 6, 2001: “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US.” Once again, experts could see the warning signs, they could see the upcoming loss of life and another Republican president sat on his hands and did nothing. And much like the Bush administration tried to blame the Clinton administration, Trump is trying desperately to blame this pandemic on Obama.

— Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog) April 27, 2020

He’s talking about Obama, right? He really is… I don’t know, childlike? When I was a toddler, my family always had cats and whenever I did anything bad, I would say “the kitty did it.” That’s what Trump is doing. It’s not a wise abdication of responsibility, it’s just an ignorant, childlike inability to understand consequences and how obvious his lies are.

Oh, and he’s also Hector Projector. The Trump Administration wants to permanently defund the World Health Organization… for reasons unknown. I think in their little pea brains, they think they can effortlessly blame WHO for the pandemic.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.

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