Thread by @AmoneyResists

It should fill you with visceral rage that the man masquerading as President not only congratulates himself for the utterly catastrophic state of our nation, but did everything possible to decimate and sabotage what Obama implemented to protect us.

This included:
—An entire division of the NSC dedicated specifically to detecting and coordinating the federal response to pandemics
—A program called PREDICT engineered to detect novel coronavirus strains in China before they spread
—A well funded WHO, HHS, and CDC

Trump isn’t just responsible for the 162,000 Americans who’ve died from COVID because of his incompetent response. He made sure we COULDN’T respond properly by gutting every program and agency we relied on to do so. Then made things worse at every turn.
foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/31/cor…

Obama set up a permanent epidemic monitoring and command group inside the WH National Security Council (NSC) and another in the Dept of Homeland Security (DHS)—both of which followed the scientific & public health leads of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the diplomatic advice of the State Department.

Trump had his National Security Advisor John Bolton dismantle all of this in 2018, and fire all of its employees.

So Trump:
—Dismantled our Pandemic Response Office
—Fired all employees
—Eliminated the PREDICT program
—Ignored the pandemic for the first 10 WEEKS
—Continued selling millions of tons of PPE to China until MARCH
—Put completely unqualified people like Kushner & Pence in charge

And what has he done since?
—Spread deadly misinformation about the virus daily
—Politicize basic safety precautions like masks
—Push for states to reopen before their case rates fell to even remotely safe levels
—Make governors bid against one another for critical supplies

He has:
—Withdrawn us from the World Health Organization
—Defunded the CDC, HHS, and NIH
—Gaslit the country about how the virus is “under control,” “going away on its own,” and “will magically disappear” (ALL LETHALLY FALSE)
—Pushed to reopen schools while cases/deaths EXPLODE

It’s not just that he ignored the Obama team’s playbook. He did the exact OPPOSITE of EVERYTHING they suggested.

If there were a playbook on “Trump’s pandemic response,” it would read like a sociopaths guide to ensuring mass murder/genocide. Because that’s what he’s done.

Timeline shows Trump:
—Refused to do anything for the first 5 weeks because he didn’t want to “spook the stock market” (and hurt his reelection)
—Refused to do anything for the next 5 weeks because he didn’t want to “disrupt his trade deal with China” (and hurt his reelection)

This timeline not only proves that Trump is responsible for TENS OF THOUSANDS OF AMERICAN DEATHS, it reveals that he got his BS talking point about “A lot of people think it goes away in April with the heat” FROM THE PRESIDENT OF CHINA
#TrumpMadeInChina
slate.com/news-and-polit…