As of the numbers reported this morning, 33 million Americans have filed for unemployment – a staggering number that is in large part a result of Trump’s failure to act early on.  Trump’s lack of preparation severely exacerbated this crisis and significantly worsened its impact on the economy.

TRUMP FAILED TO ACT: Trump’s intelligence officials warned about the threat of coronavirus in November and briefed him at the beginning of January. Trump had ample lead time before coronavirus reached the United States, but he failed to prepare or assemble a coherent response.

ABC News: “As far back as late November, U.S. intelligence officials were warning that a contagion was sweeping through China’s Wuhan region, changing the patterns of life and business and posing a threat to the population, according to four sources briefed on the secret reporting. Concerns about what is now known to be the novel coronavirus pandemic were detailed in a November intelligence report by the military’s National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), according to two officials familiar with the document’s contents.”

CNN: “That day came on January 3, the first day the President’s daily briefing included information the US intelligence community had gathered about the contagion in China and the potential it had to spread, including to the US, according to a person briefed on the matter.”

Washington Post Fact Checker: “The president spent nearly two months issuing confusing and contradictory signals — leaving the bureaucratic machine of the U.S. government to chart the course for the coronavirus response …  The missteps that went unmanaged were ignored by leaders at the highest level of government and allowed cases to go undetected, contributing to the spike in the virus’s spread.”

FAILED TO TEST: The U.S. still lags behind other countries in per capita testing, and Trump continues to lie about the availability of tests.

Associated Press: “Testing blunders crippled US response as coronavirus spread”

Associated Press: “The U.S. has tested far fewer people than all other countries combined. It also lags dozens of countries in testing its population proportionally… The total number of tests performed country to country is a poor measure of success because populations obviously differ hugely. On a more telling measure — the proportion of a country’s population that gets tested — the U.S. was not only late getting started but is still way behind.”

AP Fact Check: “Trump won’t admit failures in virus testing”

Vox: “In the last week of April, the US averaged around 220,000 tests a day — not much of an improvement from the roughly 150,000 a day that it reported during the first few weeks of the month, and far from what experts say is needed to control the outbreak (as South Korea and Germany have).”

FAILED TO SECURE SUPPLIES: Trump ignored early warnings that hospitals lacked sufficient supplies. His failed response contributed to shortages across the country, and now instead of addressing these shortages he is pretending they don’t exist.

Politico: “Seven days before Donald Trump took office … The Trump team was told it could face specific challenges, such as shortages of ventilators, anti-viral drugs and other medical essentials, and that having a coordinated, unified national response was ‘paramount’ — warnings that seem eerily prescient given the ongoing coronavirus crisis.”

CNN: “President Donald Trump contradicted a nurse he was honoring in the Oval Office on Wednesday, insisting there are no personal protective equipment shortages in the US despite her account that availability could be ‘sporadic.’”

DECLARING MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: Instead of doing more to fight the virus, Trump is declaring victory and turning his focus away from public health as infection rates across most of the country continue to rise and new hotspots emerge.

New York Times: “President Trump declared himself a wartime president. Now he has begun doing what past commanders have done when a war goes badly: Declare victory and go home. The war, however, does not seem over. Outside New York, the coronavirus pandemic in the United States is still growing, not receding. The latest death toll estimates have more than doubled from what Mr. Trump predicted just weeks ago.”

New York Times: “The country is still in the firm grip of a pandemic with little hope of release. For every indication of improvement in controlling the virus, new outbreaks have emerged elsewhere, leaving the nation stuck in a steady, unrelenting march of deaths and infections.”