Not only did the organization provide the world with its first information about the budding epidemic through daily Situation Reports—Americans working at the organization also kept the Trump administration fully up to speed on all the latest information about the virus. In fact, more than a dozen Americans working full-time at the World Health Organization on the novel coronavirus late last year "transmitted real-time information about its discovery and spread in China to the Trump administration," according to The Washington Post.

Late last year. Those Americans were researchers, doctors, and public health experts based at the organization's Geneva headquarters. Some of them were also employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who had been detailed to the WHO for a regular rotation. But the bottom line is, top Trump officials had better access than almost anyone in the world to the emerging crisis from its very earliest days.

It's just one more early warning signal that Trump made the deliberate choice to ignore, leaving the country completely unprepared for the pandemic and defenseless. U.S. intelligence operatives also warned top Trump officials—as early as last November—that some sort of disease was ripping through China's Wuhan region, disrupting the area's normal flow of life. The disruption, along with apprehension over what it signaled, were assembled in a November intelligence report by the military's National Center for Medical Intelligence.

So Trump and his White House had ample intel about the potential disaster to come and plenty of time to begin laying the groundwork for it, in terms of both preparing the national psyche and having adequate equipment supplies and a national infrastructure plan for deployment. Instead, Trump did nothing, absolutely nothing to protect and defend the American people—his No. 1 responsibility as commander in chief.