Donald Trump’s handling of this crisis wasn’t merely predictable. It was predicted. In March 2016, Art Caplan, bioethicist at New York University, published a blog about an imaginary pandemic under the then almost unimaginable Trump presidency.
Caplan got many details right. He has the virus jumping from animals in Chinese markets to humans with a “lethality [not] seen since the Spanish flu outbreak of 1918”. People are urged to “stay home, wear masks”. Then President Trump leaps into action, closing borders and screening passengers on international flights. “Many pointed out that these measures did not work and that the mutated virus was already in the US,” writes Caplan.
But Trump “noted that immigrants often brought disease”, and suggested the pandemic was “part of a conspiracy”. A “political battle [erupts] between Trump, recalcitrant governors in many states, [and] his own CDC amidst catcalls from the international community”. Eventually, Trump gets distracted by a “trade war with China to punish them for allowing an epidemic”.