Biden eyes expanded ‘battleground’ map
President had 3 years to restock gear, critics say
Candidate’s campaign is betting that as many as 16 states could be up for grabs in election.
WASHINGTON — For the first three years of his presidency, Donald Trump did not publicly utter the words “pandemic” or “preparedness.” Not in speeches, rallies or his many news conferences, planned and impromptu.
But Friday, the White House pointed to extensive planning exercises the administration conducted and reports it wrote warning of the threat in 2018.
Still, Trump has repeatedly said that the blame for the federal government having inadequate stockpiles of crucial supplies and machines needed to cope with an outbreak lay with his predecessor, Barack Obama.
Obama has been a persistent foil for Trump on a number of issues, but in the case of planning for the pandemic he has devoted little attention to the 69page “playbook” from the Obama administration about the threat of a viral outbreak that might include Ebola or an airborne respiratory illness like coronavirus. And the Obama administration could draw from a similar document written during the administration of George W. Bush in 2006.
The politics of pandemic planning have gotten increasingly pitched as the COVID-19 death toll in the country tops 87,000.
Trump claims he inherited a “broken, terrible” system from Obama. Critics counter that Trump had three years in office to prepare — more than enough time to build on the pandemic strategies he inherited.
The friction was laid bare in the Rose Garden and the White House briefing room Friday.
Trump, at a midday event outside the Oval Office, declared: “I inherited nothing. I inherited practically nothing from the previous administration, unfortunately.”
His spokeswoman, Kayleigh McEnany, later displayed a copy of the Obama plan dismissively during a briefing in the White House press room before hoisting two binders of what she called the superior Trump plans.
Beth Cameron, who worked on pandemic planning in the Obama administration, said the playbook that the Obama administration presented to the Trump administration “was given, briefed and discussed with the incoming administration, explicitly.”
She said it was intended to provide the White House with a set of questions it should ask early on in an emerging epidemic or pandemic threat.
“It outlined who should come together to answer those questions and to be prepared to anticipate what was coming next to get moving,” Cameron said. She said the Trump administration was slow to respond to COVID-19 and that Obama’s playbook could have helped the administration get ahead of an emerging threat like the coronavirus.
Cameron said the Bush and Obama administrations both did extensive planning for pandemics and many of those plans were passed to the Trump White House. “They were not political. They were nonpartisan,” she added.
McEnany styled the Trump administration’s response to COVID-19 as “unprecedented.”
She referred to Obama’s plan as a “thin packet of paper” that was replaced by “two detailed, robust pandemic response reports commissioned by the Trump administration.”
Her comments drew criticism from Ron Klain, who was the U.S. Ebola response coordinator during the Obama administration and now advises Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden.
“Let’s get to the bottom line,” Klain tweeted after McEnany’s briefing. “If their position now is that they HAD a plan, and that THIS was their plan I fail to see how that is a helpful argument for them in any way.”
The Trump administration’s 36-page National Biodefense Strategy, issued in September 2018, was a self-described “call to action.”
Among the many goals was bolstering preparedness to save lives through “medical countermeasures,” such as vaccines, ventilators, diagnostic tests and personal protective equipment like medical gowns and masks that were in short supply in the early days of the pandemic.
McEnacy said the nation’s stockpile was insufficient, but didn’t answer questions about why Trump didn’t work to restock it during his first three years in office. The White House said the stockpile had only 28% of the items needed during a pandemic and contained less than a onemonth supply of key items, but the administration is updating inventories and how they are distributed.
“President Trump has been in office for well over three years now, which is more than enough to build upon the pandemic strategies he inherited,” said Lawrence Gostin, a public health expert at Georgetown University who worked with the Bush and Obama administrations on global health issues.
“It’s quite evident that whatever pandemic planning had been done during the Bush or Obama administrations never made it to high levels in the Trump administration.”
He thinks Trump was just focused on other issues — that pandemic planning wasn’t a top priority for the president.
Gostin said he was startled when Trump first said that no one expected a pandemic like COVID-19 to happen.
“Well, every global health expert expected this to happen,” Gostin said.