In the months since Donald Trump left the White House in a cloud of shame and disgrace, it seems as though the less-than-flattering tell-all books are coming out against him in waves after waves. One of those books comes from Washington Post reporters Damian Paletta and Yasmeen Abutaleb and gives the American people a deep and frankly terrifying view inside the Trump administration’s catastrophic response to the pandemic that has rocked this country to its core for nearly two years now.
The new book, Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History, tells of all the shortcomings and bad decisions made by the former guy that ultimately got us where we are today as President Biden tries to clean up the mess that was left behind — one of which was the then-president’s decision to basically ignore his health secretary, Alex Azar, who was trying to warn Trump of the severity of the virus back in January of 2020.
According to the book, Trump was at his Mar-a-Lago hot on the heels of his first impeachment in the House over his Ukraine scheme, and the Senate was preparing for his trial when the ex-president gave his health official the cold shoulder. According to the book, aides to the ex-president had sent him off to his West Palm Beach resort in an effort to cheer him up amid his first impeachment scandal.
While the then-president was off at his golf resort recovering from his humiliating impeachment, health officials in the nation were beginning to grow extremely concerned about the deadly COVID-19 virus.
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The book goes on to tell of a mid-January 2020 phone call that Azar made to Trump while he was at his golf resort, before the pandemic had truly broken out and locked down the country, in which the health official reportedly told the then-president, “Mr. President, I’ve got to tell you something. There’s this new virus out of China that could be extremely dangerous. It could be the kind of thing we have been preparing for and worried about.”
Azar went on to explain to Trump that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had already begun to screen travelers coming from China and advised him that the US should probably begin taking additional safety measures in an effort to mitigate the spread of the fatal, highly transmittable virus.
But according to the book, Trump didn’t really seem to care.
“Yeah, okay,” Trump allegedly responded to the health official before hanging up the phone on him, seemingly unconvinced of the massive threat that was growing against the nation.
Azar, who was then serving as the head of the Health and Human Services Department, was unable to get the message through to the president. Apparently, Trump was already quite upset with Azar over a recent health policy that ultimately banned most flavored electronic cigarettes — a move that had angered many of Trump’s supporters and made the then-president worry that it would cost him his reelection.
The book notes that Azar “could barely get a word in before Trump started shouting” at him over electronic cigarettes during that fateful January phone call.
Within that same month, Trump butted heads with Azar once again when the now ex-president wanted to send out a tweet praising Chinese President Xi Jinping on the pandemic and the health official was forced to beg him not to do such a thing.
“For the love of God, don’t do that,” Aar allegedly pleaded with Trump. But, as we all know, Donald did it anyway.
Trump’s dismissal of Azar’s dire warning was the starting point of a long ling of catastrophic denials, in a sense. As the infection and death rates began to absolute soar in the nation, the president continued to blatantly ignore, deny, and dismiss public health information from officials within his own administration. He would ultimately go on to publicly lie to the American people he took an oath to protect as he downplayed the severity of the deadly virus that was ravishing this country and would totally dismiss public guidelines such as mask wearing and social distancing.
Under Trump’s reign of terror, this country senselessly lost more than 400,000 souls.
You can read more here.
Featured image via Flickr/The White House
