President Obama tried. He really tried.

In a normal world, the president of the United States would be responding competently and effectively to a global pandemic, helping along with the rest of the leaders of the industrialized nations to combat it around the world. The last president of the United States, Barack Obama, and his administration tried to make that happen. They really tried. But no one could predict just how bad Donald Trump would be.

In January 2017, the Obama administration’s transition team conducted tabletop disaster response activities with Trump's top aides. One of those tests was eerily prescient—a strain of novel and deadly influenza they called H9N2, origination in Asia and quickly spreading to Europe and then to the U.S. "Health officials warn that this could become the worst influenza pandemic since 1918," the Obama team told Trump's aides in the exercise, according to the documents and interviews from that transition effort obtained by Politico.