Along With So Much Else, This Is Of Major Importance When Putting Donald J. Trump in Perspective!

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By Henry S. Villard

Ladies and Gentlemen and readers of Mr. Berkwitt’s wonderful Ringside Report:

As I wrote to you when I first began this column, I am truly new at this effort, but, that being noted, I hope and trust that, first, you will not be disturbed by the frequency of my columns nor will you be disturbed by the urgent need for you to have this information, as much as for your safety as to help you recognize—and I think that I am certain that the majority of you already have done so—that the person occupying the Oval Office in the White House, besides all his other faults and flaws, is a total, absolute and complete LIAR, and if you have not already been completely convinced of that, I ask you to read carefully (not just scan) the below, because it proves, absolutely, unquestionably and totally, the disgracefulness not only of the attempts to avoid facing truth and facts, but of the willingness to lie and lie and lie and lie, not only by Mr. Trump, but by almost every person surrounding him. I commend to you the following with my comment following the article:

(From HSV: This article, which appeared today in The New York Times, was the major frontis page piece on today’s (Tuesday, April 7th) Yahoo home page.)

The New York Times
Trade Adviser Warned White House in January of Risks of a Pandemic
Maggie Haberman

The New York Times April 7, 2020, 8:21 AM EDT

A top White House adviser starkly warned Trump administration officials in late January that the coronavirus crisis could cost the United States trillions of dollars and put millions of Americans at risk of illness or death.

The warning, written in a memo by Peter Navarro, President Donald Trump’s trade adviser, is the highest-level alert known to have circulated inside the West Wing as the administration was taking its first substantive steps to confront a crisis that had already consumed China’s leaders and would go on to upend life in Europe and the United States.

“The lack of immune protection or an existing cure or vaccine would leave Americans defenseless in the case of a full-blown coronavirus outbreak on U.S. soil,” Navarro’s memo said. “This lack of protection elevates the risk of the coronavirus evolving into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans.”

Dated Jan. 29, it came during a period when Trump was playing down the risks to the United States, and he would later go on to say that no one could have predicted such a devastating outcome.

Navarro said in the memo that the administration faced a choice about how aggressive to be in containing an outbreak, saying the human and economic costs would be relatively low if it turned out to be a problem along the lines of a seasonal flu.

But he went on to emphasize that the “risk of a worst-case pandemic scenario should not be overlooked” given the information coming from China.

In one worst-case scenario cited in the memo, more than a half-million Americans could die.

A second memo that Navarro wrote, dated Feb. 23, warned of an “increasing probability of a full-blown COVID-19 pandemic that could infect as many as 100 million Americans, with a loss of life of as many as 1.2 million souls.”

At that time, Trump was still downplaying the threat of the virus. The administration was considering asking Congress for more money to address the situation, and the second memo, which circulated around the West Wing and was obtained by The Times, urged an immediate supplemental spending appropriation from Congress of at least $3 billion.

“This is NOT a time for penny-pinching or horse trading on the Hill,” Navarro wrote in the second memo, which was unsigned but which officials attributed to him. It was unclear whether Trump saw the second memo, whose contents were first reported by Axios.

The second memo seemed aimed at members of the White House Task Force established by Trump to manage the crisis, and reflected deep divisions within the administration about how to proceed and persistent feuding between Navarro and many other top officials about his role and his views.

“Any member of the Task Force who wants to be cautious about appropriating funds for a crisis that could inflict trillions of dollars in economic damage and take millions of lives has come to the wrong administration,” the memo said.

Among other things, the memo called for an increase funding for the government to purchase personal protective equipment for health care workers, estimating they would need “at least a billion face masks” over a four-to-six-month period.

The administration ended up asking for $2.5 billion. Congress then approved $8 billion.

Navarro is now the administration’s point person for supply chain issues for medical and other equipment needed to deal with the virus.

The January memo written by Navarro was dated the same day that Trump named a White House task force to deal with the threat, and as the administration was weighing whether to bar some travelers from China, an option being pushed by Navarro.

Trump would approve the limits on travel from China the next day, though it would be weeks before he began taking more aggressive steps to head off spread of the virus.

Questions about Trump’s handling of crisis, especially in its early days when he suggested it was being used by Democrats to undercut his reelection prospects, are likely to define his presidency. Navarro’s memo is evidence that some in the upper ranks of the administration had at least considered the possibility of the outbreak turning into something far more serious than Trump was acknowledging publicly at the time.

Neither Navarro nor spokespeople for the White House responded to requests for comment.

The memo, which was reviewed by The New York Times, was sent from Navarro to the National Security Council and then distributed to several officials across the administration, people familiar with the events said. It reached a number of top officials as well as aides to Mick Mulvaney, then the acting chief of staff, they said, but it was unclear whether Trump saw it.

Navarro is a well-established China hawk who has long been mistrustful of the country’s government and trade practices. Both Navarro and Matthew Pottinger, the chief deputy at the National Security Council, were among the few officials urging colleagues in January to take a harder line in relation to the growing threat of the coronavirus.

But their warnings were seen by other officials as primarily reflecting their concerns about China’s behavior — and their concerns look more prescient in hindsight than they actually were, other officials argue.

With the subject line “Impose Travel Ban on China?” Navarro opened the memo by writing, “If the probability of a pandemic is greater than roughly 1%, a game-theoretic analysis of the coronavirus indicates the clear dominant strategy is an immediate travel ban on China.”

Navarro concluded at one point: “Regardless of whether the coronavirus proves to be a pandemic-level outbreak, there are certain costs associated with engaging in policies to contain and mitigate the spread of the disease. The most readily available option to contain the spread of the outbreak is to issue a travel ban to and from the source of the outbreak, namely, mainland China.”

He suggested that under an “aggressive” containment scenario, a travel ban may need to last as long as 12 months for proper containment, a duration of time that at that point some White House aides saw as unsustainable.

The travel limits subsequently imposed by Trump did not entirely ban travel from China, and many travelers from the country continued to stream into the United States.

Navarro was at odds with medical experts like Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who had argued that such travel bans only delay the eventual spread.

Navarro alluded to that debate Saturday during a separate argument with Fauci in the Situation Room about the whether the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine was effective in treating or preventing the virus, according to two people familiar with the events.

In the memo, Navarro cautioned that it was “unlikely the introduction of the coronavirus into the U.S. population in significant numbers will mimic a ‘seasonal flu’ event with relatively low contagion and mortality rates.”

He noted the history of pandemic flus and suggested the chances were elevated for one after the new pathogen had developed in China.

“This historical precedent alone should be sufficient to prove the need to take aggressive action to contain the outbreak,” he wrote, going on to say the early estimates of how easily the virus was spreading supported the possibility that the risks were even greater than the history of flu pandemics suggested.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Trump is, simply put, beyond and beside all of his other list of unending faults, a consummate and total liar, to the point that—I honestly, firmly and truly believe—he no longer (if he ever did) had any recognition of the fact that anything and everything he says, without exception, is either a complete or a total lie. In fact, it is the only thing that he is skilled at, and that “thing” is his ability to lie endlessly and without even the vaguest understanding or the least bit of caring that he is doing so. In conclusion, for this column, then, I hope you will keep one further item in mind: besides being totally unfit for the job he holds, having reached his level of greatest incompetence (Peter Principle) at some point in his years in junior high school, this country MUST vote him out in the next election and when they do so they (and we) need to be totally prepared for what the great Bill Maher has been warning us about for the last two years: that lowlife who never should have been president will cry and scream and threaten, claiming that “the election was rigged,” and that he, as president, has the right to declare it null and void and he will then state that because of that he is staying in the White House and remaining as President. (You think I’m an alarmist? Believe me, I am not, and you better be prepared for him to do, as Mr. Maher has stated numerous times, exactly that.)

Stay well and stay safe, all, and remember that this whole horror—this Moronavirus—is, in the United States, the total fault of one man and one man only, Donald J. Trump.

Be well, all.

Henry S. Villard.