On CNN’s “State of the Union,” White House trade adviser Peter Navarro blamed the “fog of war” for Trump’s decision to intentionally withhold full information about the deadly potency of the coronavirus. Navarro, who was a rare voice of alarm in the earliest days of the pandemic, said that Trump received competing advice from experts, leading the president to play down the virus, as he explained to The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward in his forthcoming book, “Rage.”“What he needed to do was stay calm, hope for the best but prepare for the worst and attack the virus,” Navarro said. Navarro read to the show’s host, Jake Tapper, portions of a Feb. 9 memo that he sent to White House officials calling for action on ramping up production of safety equipment for health-care workers, testing for the virus and intensifying searches for therapeutics to treat the disease and for a vaccine. “If we start right now, we could have a vaccine by the end of the year,” Navarro said, summarizing the points he made Feb. 9 — advice that Trump himself did not follow through on. Biden campaign senior policy adviser Jake Sullivan, meanwhile, continued to hammer Trump for his handling of the pandemic, pushing back against the notion that the president was making decisions within the “fog of war.”“Donald Trump got all that information, learned this virus was deadly, learned it was airborne, learned it was worse than the flu — and then lied to the American people and did nothing about it,” Sullivan said on “Fox News Sunday.”Sullivan also defended Biden’s decision to continue holding campaign rallies into early March, noting that the former vice president was not privy to the same information about the virus as Trump was.

Source: Washington Post September 13, 2020 13:40 UTC