Donald Trump, in seeking election to a second term, is promising to bring back the good ol’ days when he was in charge. He’s even used the time-honored political mantra, inanely in all caps: “ARE YOU BETTER OFF THAN YOU WERE FOUR YEARS AGO?” It’s a peculiar question, given that four years ago the nation was reeling from the greatest public health crisis in modern history—a crisis that Trump, by any measure, spectacularly mismanaged.
As it happens, The Progressive tracked Trump’s almost daily steps for a two-page “Smoking Gun” offering called “Crisis? What Crisis?” It first appeared in the magazine’s June/July 2020 issue, and, since Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic didn’t end when that issue went to press, we continued our timeline online. Day after day, intern Nuha Dolby and I would plug in new entries. We continued it all the way until mid-November, about two weeks after Trump was defeated at the polls. Recently, I revisited that timeline and continued it through the end of Trump’s presidency. I made a few tweaks and trims, added a few items here and there, and found new links to replace ones that had stopped working.
The result is an absolute tidal wave of gross incompetence on the part of the former and would-be future President, which led to tens of thousands of preventable deaths. It is a shocking reminder of Trump’s manifest unfitness in a time of crisis.
January 2017: Days before Trump’s Inauguration, members of his administration are briefed by outgoing Obama Administration officials on the need to prepare for a pandemic. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross reportedly dozes off; others grouse about having to attend.
May 2018: Trump disbands the White House agency charged with planning for a pandemic and reassigns its top official. “In a world of limited resources, you have to pick and choose,” says one Trump team member.
January to August 2019: The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services conducts a training exercise for a hypothetical respiratory virus that begins in China and spreads rapidly to the United States. A draft report identified multiple failings in the government’s ability to respond. Nothing is done about it.
January 10, 2020: Former Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert, sacked by President Donald Trump in 2018, warns in a tweet: “We face a global health threat,” imploring the nation to “Coordinate!”
January 11: Chinese scientists post the genome of the new coronavirus, and within a week German virologists produce the first diagnostic test for the disease.
January 18: Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar briefs Trump in a phone call on the potential seriousness of COVID-19.
January 22: Asked at a press conference if he is worried about a pandemic, Trump replies, “No. Not at all. And we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control.”
January 27: White House aides meet with then-acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney “trying to get senior officials to pay more attention to the virus,” according to The Washington Post.
January 29: White House Economic Adviser Peter Navarro warns that COVID-19 could take more than half a million American lives and cause nearly $6 trillion in economic damage.
January 30: Azar speaks directly to Trump about a possible pandemic. Trump brands him an alarmist. That same day, the World Health Organization declares COVID-19 a global health emergency.
Late January to early February 2020: U.S. intelligence officials emphatically warn Trump at his daily briefings about the developing pandemic. “The system was blinking red,” one official told The Washington Post. “They just couldn’t get him to do anything about it.”
February 2: Trump tells Fox News host Sean Hannity, “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China.”
February 10: Russ Vought, Trump’s acting OMB director, states during a press briefing, “Coronavirus is not something that is going to have ripple effects.”
February 23: Navarro sends another memo, this one directly to Trump, warning that COVID-19 could kill as many as two million Americans.
February 25: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tells reporters it expects COVID-19 to spread across the country, causing “severe” disruption. Trump is angered by this announcement, saying it alarmed people unnecessarily and caused the stock market to drop.
Late February: The United States refuses to join more than sixty nations in accepting diagnostic test supplies from the World Health Organization, saying it wants to develop its own test.
February 27: Trump assures the nation the virus will “like a miracle . . . disappear.” The next day, he tells supporters at a rally in South Carolina, “Now, the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus . . . . This is their new hoax.”
March 4: In a Fox News appearance, Trump blames testing delays on Barack Obama, who left office more than three years before. He disputes the World Health Organization’s death rate findings, saying he had a “hunch” the numbers are lower.
March 6: Trump proudly announces, “Anybody that wants a test can get a test,” which isn’t true. That same day, he calls the pandemic “an unforeseen problem” that “came out of nowhere.”
March 13: Trump blames Obama for testing delays, saying “I don’t take responsibility at all.”
March 19: Trump says the outbreak “is something that just surprised the whole world. And if people would have known about it, it could have stopped—been stopped in place.”
March 27: Trump for the first time invokes the Defense Production Act to order General Motors to begin manufacturing ventilators, work that was already underway.
April 4: Trump, in his press briefing, calls the outbreak “something that nobody could have ever projected.”
April 11: The United States passes all other nations in the number of COVID-19 deaths, including China and India, both of which have populations more than four times as large.
April 12: Navarro, in an appearance on 60 Minutes, challenges the program to find any segment it aired during the Bush or Obama Administrations that said, “Hey, global pandemic’s coming.” The show points out that it aired such stories in 2005 and 2009, with Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health warning that the nation “would not be prepared.”
Andrea Hanks/Official White House Photo (Public domain)
Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony S. Fauci delivers remarks during a coronavirus update briefing on April 16, 2020, in the White House. President Donald Trump looks on.
April 13: Trump falsely asserts it will be entirely his decision, not that of governors, when “to open up the states.”
April 14: Trump, in a fundraising appeal, urges his supporters to “stand with him and hold China accountable for their lies and deceptions during the Coronavirus pandemic”—by sending him money.
April 17: Trump urges citizens in several states with Democratic governors to rebel against the health advice being offered by his own administration and demand an end to protective measures meant to staunch the spread of COVID-19.
April 20: Trump declares at his daily briefing, “People are amazed at how early I acted.” He predicts between 50,000 and 60,000 total COVID-19 deaths, saying this would be a triumph.
April 23: Trump suggests at his daily briefing that one way for people to battle COVID-19 is by injecting themselves with disinfectants like bleach.
April 27: As the number of U.S. deaths nears his upper prediction of 60,000, Trump tosses out a new number: 70,000. “I think we’ve done a great job,” he says.
April 29: Trump asserts that Americans will soon be having “some massive rallies and people will be sitting next to each other.”
May 3: As the number of U.S. deaths nears 70,000, Trump revises his upward estimate to 90,000.
May 5: Trump announces his plan to disband his coronavirus task force.
May 6: Trump changes his mind, saying he wants the task force to continue “indefinitely.”
May 8: Contradicting his own experts, Trump announces that the coronavirus “is going to go away without a vaccine.” He doesn’t say when.
May 14: Trump identifies a solution to the crisis: “If we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases.”
May 17: Health Secretary Azar winks at yahoos across the country who are crowding into bars against the advice of health officials: “I think in any individual instance you’re going to see people doing things that are irresponsible. That’s part of the freedom that we have here in America.”
May 19: Trump defends his decision to take hydroxychloroquine, calling a study produced by his own government that found the anti-malarial drug did more harm than good “a Trump enemy statement.”
May 22: The United States has now recorded about 95,000 COVID-19 deaths, more than twice as many as any other nation.
May 22: The medical journal Lancet publishes a study of Trump’s suggested use of antimalarial drugs on 96,000 hospitalized COVID-19 patients on six continents. For those given hydroxychloroquine, there was a 34 percent increase in risk of mortality and a 137 percent increased risk of a serious heart arrhythmia.
May 25: Trump threatens to pull the planned late-August Republican National Convention from North Carolina if state officials don’t agree to allow the event to be “fully occupied.”
May 26: Trump mocks Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and a reporter at a press conference for wearing masks in public, as his own health officials have recommend.
May 27: Four months after the United States records its first known case of COVID-19, the death toll for Americans tops 100,000. Trump complains in a tweet: The Radical Left Lamestream Media, together with their partner, the Do Nothing Democrats, are trying to spread a new narrative that President Trump was slow in reacting to Covid 19. Wrong, I was very fast . . . !”
May 29: Trump announces that the United States will withdraw from the World Health Organization, saying the organization has failed to hold China accountable for the spread of COVID-19.
June 2: Trump tweets that he is seeking a new venue for the Republican National Convention because North Carolina has refused to guarantee that the event can be held without COVID-19 restrictions like facial masks and social distancing.
June 8: Trump, not having held any rallies since March, announces his plans to restart them in the next two weeks. His campaign manager, Brad Parscale says, “You’ll again see the kind of crowds and enthusiasm that sleepy Joe Biden can only dream of.”
June 11: Regeneron Pharmaceuticals begins the first U.S. human clinical trials of a COVID-19 antibody cocktail.
June 15: The federal Food and Drug Administration withdraws emergency approval for hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug Trump lauded as treatment for COVID-19. The FDA says such medications are “likely to be ineffective.”
June 16: Vice President Pence says fears of COVID-19 are “overblown” as nine states hit new single-day highs or set records for seven-day new coronavirus case averages.
June 20: Trump holds a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, despite warnings from health officials about the risk of spreading COVID-19. On the day of the rally, six of Trump’s own campaign staff test positive for the virus; two more cases are subsequently confirmed among staff who worked the event.
June 22: Twenty-nine states report a jump in COVID-19 cases, with some breaking daily records. Many new outbreaks occurred in Georgia, Texas, and Florida, states that were among the earliest to reopen.
June 23: Trump doubles down on claims he made at his Tulsa rally, saying he wasn’t joking when he asked health officials to slow down testing for COVID-19 so the numbers weren’t as bad. The White House had tried explaining away his comments as being “in jest.”
June 26: Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine, slams Vice President Mike Pence for saying the United States is doing a good job of containing COVID-19 except for “a couple of hotspots.” Hotez says: “These are not ‘hotspots’—these are the largest metropolitan areas in the United States.”
June 29: The United States surpasses 2.5 million cases of COVID-19.
June 30: The European Union re-opens its borders to fourteen countries but not the United States because of its failure to contain COVID-19. Dr. Anthony Fauci says he “would not be surprised” if the U.S. daily total of new cases more than doubles to 100,000 cases per day.
July 6: Trump tweets that the United States now has the world’s lowest COVID-19 mortality rate. According to data from Johns Hopkins University, it actually has the sixth-highest death rate among the twenty most-affected countries, at 4.5 percent.
July 7: Five weeks after threatening to do so, Trump announces that the United States is formally withdrawing from the World Health Organization. This comes on the same day the nation hits three million cases of coronavirus.
July 8: Trump denounces the CDC’s guidelines for reopening schools, including masks, hygiene, and staggered scheduling, calling them “impractical.” He also says Democrats “think it’s going to be good for them politically, so they keep the schools closed.”
July 18: The Trump Administration axes billions of dollars in funding recommended by Republicans for COVID-19 testing and contact tracing.
July 20: In an interview with Fox News, Trump says many COVID-19 cases are young people who “have the sniffles.” On this same day, the official U.S. death toll from COVID-19 tops 140,000.
July 28: Trump praises Stella Immanuel, a doctor and preacher who believes in witchcraft and alleges a plot to vaccinate people against being religious, calling her “spectacular.” On this same day, the U.S. COVID-19 death toll surpasses 150,000.
July 30: Former GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain dies from COVID-19; he was diagnosed with the virus days after attending a Trump rally in Tulsa, without wearing a mask. It later comes to light that Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows responded to this news by saying, “We killed Herman Cain.”
August 4: Trump rebukes Dr. Deborah Birx, White House coronavirus task force coordinator, for saying the pandemic is “extraordinarily widespread” across the country, blaming her negative outlook on “Crazy Nancy Pelosi.”
August 5: “It’s going away. It’ll go away. Things go away. No question in my mind that it will go away,” Trump says regarding COVID-19 during a White House press briefing. This comes days after Dr. Fauci told the House Select Subcommittee that he did not believe the coronavirus would ever completely go away given its contagious nature.
August 5: Twitter temporarily blocks Trump’s election campaign account from tweeting until it removes a post with a video clip from a Fox News interview in which Trump falsely claims children are “almost immune from this disease.” Facebook removes a post containing the same video from Trump’s personal page.
August 9: The United States hits five million cases of COVID-19, by far the highest number in the world.
August 22: President Trump tweets that “The deep state, or whoever, over at the FDA is making it very difficult for drug companies to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics. Obviously, they are hoping to delay the answer until after November 3.”
August 23: Trump announces FDA authorization of the emergency use of convalescent plasma therapy, an unproven treatment, for COVID-19 patients. Scientists react with alarm, with one saying “if you end up hospitalized, your doctor won’t know if plasma is helpful or not. That’s why we do science.”
September 2: Trump goes maskless as he surveys the damage done during protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin. At a roundtable meeting during the trip, Trump says those in attendance can take off their face masks “if you feel more comfortable” doing so.
September 4: According to a forecast from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, the global death toll from the coronavirus pandemic could triple by the end of 2020, with a fall wave of infections potentially propelling fatalities in the United States to 410,000.
September 11: Politico reports that Trump-appointed health aides demanded and received the right to review CDC reports charting the progress of COVID-19, which have contradicted Trump’s optimistic messages about the pandemic. “CDC to me appears to be writing hit pieces on the administration,” one appointee complained.
September 14: Health and Human Services spokesperson Michael Caputo accuses scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of gathering a “resistance unit” for “sedition” against President Trump.
September 17: Newly revealed documents show that the U.S. Postal Service had planned to send 650 million masks to American households for free, even drafting a press release. But the plan was scrapped.“There was concern from some in the White House . . . that households receiving masks might create concern or panic,” explained one administration official.
September 21: The CDC website is edited to remove notes suggesting that COVID-19 can spread through airborne transmission. The agency claims the language had been posted in error, but former FDA chief Dr Scott Gottlieb tells CNBC that “It’s really hard to believe that this was an accidental posting.”
September 22: The United States hits 200,000 coronavirus deaths.
September 30: Researchers at Cornell University who analyzed thirty-eight million articles about the pandemic in media around the world release a study finding Trump to be the single largest driver of spreading coronavirus misinformation, which it dubbed an “infodemic.”
October 2: Trump announces that he and First Lady Melania have tested positive for COVID-19. The previous afternoon, Trump attended a fundraising rally in New Jersey, potentially putting his own supporters at risk.
October 5: Trump urges Americans, none of whom have access to health care comparable to his, to “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.” On returning from the hospital and still highly contagious, Trump removes his mask before entering the White House.
Judd Deere/Office of Deputy Press Secretary (Public domain)
President Donald Trump returns to the White House on October 5, 2020, from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, where he was treated for COVID-19.
Oct 6: Stephen Miller, Trump’s top speechwriter, tests positive for the coronavirus. This brings the total number of cases in the White House outbreak to at least thirty-four.
October 13: Two anonymous senior White House administration officials tout herd immunity, the idea that the best way to fight COVID-19 is to have lots of people contract it. Health experts, The New York Times reports, “have concluded that about 85 to 90 percent of the American population is still susceptible to the coronavirus.”
October 16: The White House appoints two political operatives, Nina Witkofsky and Chester Moeller, to the CDC to try to control the information it releases about the pandemic. Neither has any public health background.
October 19: “People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots,” President Trump declares during a campaign stop, later calling Dr. Fauci a “disaster.” Also, Twitter removes a tweet by Scott Atlas, a Trump favorite health advisor, that declares: “Masks work? NO.” Twitter says this violated its policy on coronavirus misinformation.
October 20: The United States’ seven-day average of new daily cases moves above 58,300, levels of COVID-19 not seen since the first week of August. Average daily new cases have increased 70 percent since September 12, when the country was at a two-month low of about 34,300.
October 25: White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows says “we are not going to control the pandemic” because “it is a contagious virus just like the flu.” The administration, he added, is “making efforts to contain it.”
October 29: In a Fox News interview, Donald Trump Jr. claims deaths from COVID-19 have dropped to “almost nothing.” On this day, 1,004 people in the U.S. die from the virus.
October 31: A Stanford University study estimates that eighteen of Trump’s reelection rallies/superspreader events have led to an additional 30,000 additional cases and 700 additional deaths.
November 2: Speaking at a campaign rally in Florida, Trump responds to a crowd’s chants of “Fire Fauci” by saying: “Don’t tell anybody, but let me wait until a little bit after the election.” Trump cannot directly fire Fauci but can pressure his boss to do so.
November 3: Joe Biden beats Trump in the presidential election, although the race is not called for several days.
November 4: The United States hits 104,004 new coronavirus cases in one day, an all-time high.
November 9: The United States tops ten million cases of coronavirus. Also, CNN reports that almost 20 percent of coronavirus patients get a psychiatric diagnosis within ninety days, mainly for depression or anxiety.
November 17: Politico reports that, for the first time in fifty years, an outgoing presidential administration is stonewalling an incoming one. Trump’s team has denied Biden’s team any COVID-19 briefings, federal agencies haven't briefed Biden’s teams in general, and no security clearances have been done for Biden staffers.
November 18: The United States surpasses 250,000 deaths due to COVID-19.
November 19: The CDC urges Americans to not travel or come into contact with non-household members for Thanksgiving, a week away.
December 11: The FDA authorizes emergency use of the first COVID-19 vaccine in the United States.
December 14: The recorded death toll from COVID-19 in the U.S. surpasses 300,000, less than four weeks after reaching the quarter-million mark.
December 29: The first U.S. case of the COVID-19 “Alpha” variant is reported by the Colorado Department of Health.
January 6, 2021: In his rambling speech exhorting his followers to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell,” Trump alleges that the dark forces arrayed against him have “used the pandemic as a way of defrauding the people in a proper election.”
January 18: The reported death toll from COVID-19 in the United States surpasses 400,000.
January 20: A new President, Joe Biden, is inaugurated.
Nuha Dolby contributed to this report.