Radnor Reports: Information for decision-makers

Steve Coll of the New Yorker –

It is painful to reflect on the tens of thousands of lives that might have been saved if a less reality-challenged President had occupied the White House.

Last February 7th, at five-thirty in the morning, Donald Trump tweeted praise for China’s “great discipline” in fighting the coronavirus and predicted that Xi Jinping would be “successful, especially as the weather starts to warm & the virus hopefully becomes weaker, and then gone.”

Later that day, the President, in an interview with Bob Woodward, acknowledged that the virus was serious, but said, “I think that that goes away in two months with the heat.” On February 24th, as infections in America increased, he tweeted, “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA.” (“I wanted to always play it down,” he later said, according to Woodward’s book “Rage.”)

It is painful to reflect today on the tens of thousands of lives that might have been saved if a less reality-challenged President occupied the White House. Trump has been consistently unreliable across the eight-month arc of our national crisis.

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