President Trump was told in late January about a memo from his trade adviser warning of the effects of the coronavirus, despite his claim later on that he had never seen the memo, The New York Times reports. Peter Navarro sent a memo on Jan. 29 alerting the president to the possible fallout from COVID-19: millions of deaths and trillions of dollars lost across the world. In April, Trump denied seeing it. But according to records and current and former officials who spoke to the Times, that wasn’t true, as Trump had been informed at the time about the predicted fallout of the pandemic. The denial was one in a long litany of ways Trump and his administration turned a blind eye to the coronavirus pandemic, according to the Times. Public health experts have warned that the White House’s slow response and failures to plan for a pandemic will likely result in American deaths.
