IT’S A FAMILIAR litany by now: As Covid-19 spread, ravaged lives, and upended the global economy over the past two months, President Donald Trump first downplayed the virus—assuring Americans that it was going to go away—then chalked it all up as a complete surprise. On January 22, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, it was all business as usual. He promised CNBC’s Joe Kernan there were no worries about a pandemic: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”
A month later, Trump’s message was the same. “It’s going to disappear,” Trump said of the coronavirus on February 27. “One day—it’s like a miracle—it will disappear.” Then, as it became clear the virus wasn’t going away, Trump has instead tried to avoid blame, arguing that the novel coronavirus pandemic is a black swan, an unimaginable, surprise, out-of-left-field event. “This was unexpected,” he said on March 10. “It hit the world.” On March 16 Trump said, “This came up—it came up so suddenly. Look, he was surprised; we were all surprised.” And on March 24, he told a Fox News town hall, “Nobody ever expected a thing like this.”
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