The next month, he told Axios that, ‘‘I like bullet [points] or I like as little as possible. I don’t need, you know, 200-page reports on something that can be handled on a page: That I can tell you.’’ Since then, reports have detailed how infrequently Trump has engaged with these reports or even taken the briefings.

‘‘You know I’m, like, a smart person,’’ he said in December 2016. ‘‘I don’t have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years.’’

WASHINGTON — Before Donald Trump’s presidency even began, he made clear just how little regard he had for the lengthy President’s Daily Brief that provides the latest US intelligence.


And now we’re discovering just how much this aversion to intelligence, expertise, and detail might have cost us.

The Washington Post’s Greg Miller and Ellen Nakashima reported that, beginning in early January, more than a dozen PDBs included dire warnings about the potential of the novel coronavirus outbreak.

It has previously been reported that the intelligence briefings contained such warnings, but the degree to which they were conveyed and the frequency was not previously known. As Miller and Nakashima reported, ‘‘US officials said it reflected a level of attention comparable to periods when analysts have been tracking active terrorism threats, overseas conflicts, or other rapidly developing security issues.’’

They go on: ‘‘For weeks, the PDB — as the report is known — traced the virus’s spread around the globe, made clear that China was suppressing information about the contagion’s transmissibility and lethal toll, and raised the prospect of dire political and economic consequences.’’

The timeline here is key. Trump first weighed in on the threat of the coronavirus on Jan. 22, when he dismissed the possibility of it becoming a pandemic. He would eventually issue travel restrictions on China, where the virus is believed to have originated, on Jan. 31. But for a month and half after that, he would not take major action, even as those around him were becoming increasingly alarmed.


One key aspect of the briefings is that they didn’t just offer warnings, but that they also alleged a Chinese coverup. In fact that allegation about China’s lack of transparency was included from the very first briefing at the beginning of January.

Despite that, Trump would spend weeks praising China’s response to the virus and insisting it had it under control. He even directly praised its ‘‘transparency’’ on Jan. 24 and flatly dismissed the idea that it was covering anything up on Feb. 7. That soft touch troubled US officials at the time. According to the new Post report, he had been advised the opposite as much as a month earlier.

A second key point here is that the new revelation suggests Trump might not have been forthcoming about when he was receiving such dire warnings. Facing a bevy of revelations about unheeded, early warning signs, he said this month that he had first learned of the severity of the situation shortly before he issued the China travel restrictions on Jan. 31.

‘‘When I learned about the gravity of it was sometime just before closing the country to China,’’ Trump said.

Trump’s statement might have been strictly accurate. He may not have learned himself of the severity of the situation, because he didn’t actually take the briefings. (There is some reason to doubt that, given experts told the Post that such developments would likely have been summarized orally for Trump, at the very least.) But whether Trump actually consumed the information or not is kind of beside the point. The point was that the warnings were there, and he either didn’t bother to consume the information or was informed and proceeded to cast doubt on all of it.