The Warning

On Monday, Politico broke a highly disturbing story (link here) about how, one week before Donald Trump's 2017 inauguration, senior officials in his incoming administration were warned in great detail by departing officials from President Obama's West Wing about the dangers and realities of a serious global pandemic, much like the one we are currently facing.

"The Trump team was told it could face specific challenges, such as shortages of ventilators, anti-viral drugs and other medical essentials, and that having a coordinated, unified national response was 'paramount' — warnings that seem eerily prescient given the ongoing coronavirus crisis," the article notes.

The detailed warning didn't sink in for many. One incoming cabinet secretary fell asleep. Some kept leaving and returning the meeting. "Some Obama aides who attended said they were left with the impression that many of the Trump aides showed up to simply check off a box more than to learn," per the piece.

Some Trump people in the room, who actually had no relevant experience, clearly felt they knew more than the highly experienced Obama people they were replacing. "The problem is that they came in very arrogant and convinced that they knew more than the outgoing administration — full swagger," per one attendee.

"There were [Trump] people who were there who said, 'This is really stupid and why do we need to be here,'" said another former official. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who fell asleep several times, and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos "were especially dismissive in conversations on the sidelines of the session."

As to whether the current chief executive himself, who did not attend the session, was aware of the pandemic threat at that time, one former senior Trump administration official said it wasn’t "the kind of thing that really interested the President very much. He was never interested in things that might happen. He’s totally focused on the stock market, the economy, and always bashing his predecessor and giving him no credit. Even though we would put time on the schedule for things like that, if they happened at all, they would be very, very brief. To get the President ... focused on something like this would be quite hard."

And, now, three years later, we see the result of this arrogance and unpreparedness. Trump still brags to this day about how he never did homework as a student nor read the required texts, as if that was something admirable.

The result is that such arrogance makes you ignorant, the last thing we need in a President as we face this unprecedented crisis.