Trust is easy to break, hard to repair.

This level of damage is going to be difficult to repair. https://t.co/NqTokRgvFG — PeakProsperity.com (@chrismartenson) April 4, 2020

Hey @Trevornoah there was a great President who said “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Stop being Fear Itself. And also try to be funny we all need it. https://t.co/mpSF9s4o7w — Matt Schlapp (@mschlapp) April 4, 2020

Here's a compilation of Dr Drew spreading dangerous misinformation about the coronavirus. Why does he still have a job? He is a JOKE. Hey @MTV, you better FIRE this piece of shit immediately.pic.twitter.com/UpqCWRDUha — ? (@Anxious_Matt) April 4, 2020

If even I knew that COVID-19 wasn’t the regular flu in late January, what kind of intelligence was the president and Congress receiving? Why didn’t they act sooner?

Washington Post:

“The Trump administration received its first formal notification of the outbreak of the coronavirus in China on Jan. 3. Within days, U.S. spy agencies were signaling the seriousness of the threat to Trump by including a warning about the coronavirus — the first of many — in the President’s Daily Brief. And yet, it took 70 days from that initial notification for Trump to treat the coronavirus not as a distant threat or harmless flu strain well under control, but as a lethal force that had outflanked America’s defenses and was poised to kill tens of thousands of citizens. That more-than-two-month stretch now stands as critical time that was squandered.Trump’s baseless assertions in those weeks, including his claim that it would all just “miraculously” go away, sowed significant public confusion and contradicted the urgent messages of public health experts. … On Jan. 21, a Seattle man who had recently traveled to Wuhan tested positive for the coronavirus, becoming the first known infection on U.S. soil. Then, two days later, Chinese authorities took the drastic step of shutting down Wuhan, turning the teeming metropolis into a ghost city of empty highways and shuttered skyscrapers, with millions of people marooned in their homes.“That was like, whoa!,” said a senior U.S. official involved in White House meetings on the crisis. “That was when the Richter scale hit 8.” … Pottinger was by then pushing for another travel ban, this time restricting the flow of travelers from Italy and other nations in the European Union that were rapidly emerging as major new nodes of the outbreak. Pottinger’s proposal was endorsed by key health-care officials, including Fauci, who argued that it was critical to close off any path the virus might take into the country. This time, the plan met with resistance from Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and others who worried about the impact on the U.S. economy. It was an early sign of tension in an area that would split the administration, pitting those who prioritized public health against those determined to avoid any disruption in an election year to the run of expansion and employment growth. … For weeks, he had barely uttered a word about the crisis that didn’t downplay its severity or propagate demonstrably false information. He dismissed the warnings of intelligence officials and top public health officials in his administration.At times, he voiced far more authentic concern about the trajectory of the stock market than the spread of the virus in the United States, railing at the chairman of the Federal Reserve and others with an intensity that he never seemed to exhibit about the possible human toll of the outbreak …”

Even if China initially downplayed the virus, I find it impossible to believe the CIA and CDC didn’t how bad the outbreak really was in January.

Washington Post:

“U.S. intelligence agencies were issuing ominous, classified warnings in January and February about the global danger posed by the coronavirus while President Trump and lawmakers played down the threat and failed to take action that might have slowed the spread of the pathogen, according to U.S. officials familiar with spy agency reporting. … Intelligence agencies “have been warning on this since January,” said a U.S. official who had access to intelligence reporting that was disseminated to members of Congress and their staffs as well as to officials in the Trump administration, and who, along with others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive information. “Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were — they just couldn’t get him to do anything about it,” this official said. “The system was blinking red.” … The warnings from U.S. intelligence agencies increased in volume toward the end of January and into early February, said officials familiar with the reports. By then, a majority of the intelligence reporting included in daily briefing papers and digests from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA was about covid-19, said officials who have read the reports. …”

What happened?

How did Peak Prosperity and TruNews know how bad the virus was in January? Why did the mainstream media and the political establishment get it so wrong? What was in their intelligence briefings?

Donald Trump received critical intelligence from his donors and conservative elites to “ride it out” and treat it as “just the flu.” Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin didn’t want to shut down travel from Europe because it would have spooked the markets. Nothing was done to respond to the virus in January and February when small steps could have been taken to track and counter it because of the focus on the markets. It was treated as a political and economic problem until it was too late.

Note: The Washington Post also said the flu was the real threat.