President Donald Trump said repeatedly in March that “nobody” could’ve predicted a crisis at the scale of the coronavirus pandemic wreaking havoc across the globe.
“Nobody knew there’d be a pandemic or an epidemic of this proportion,” Trump said March 19. A week later, he reiterated that “nobody would have ever thought a thing like this could have happened.”
But according to reports in The New York Times and Axios on Monday, at least one top official in Trump’s own administration sounded the alarm ― in late January and then again in February ― about the potentially catastrophic impacts of the virus that causes COVID-19 on the United States.