Trump's coronavirus failures have caused the 'American carnage' he promised to end

20, 2017, President Donald Trump painted an unrecognizably dark picture of our country culminating with the bizarre declaration, "This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.".

We are only now experiencing the American carnage Trump once grimly accused former President Barack Obama of overseeing — and it could have been avoided with preparation and leadership.

As a senior policy adviser to an Obama administration Cabinet member, I attended part of the Jan.

The meeting included at least 30 members of the incoming Cabinet and staff, alongside their Obama administration counterparts.

23 — with little or no response from the Trump administration through March other than denial, disinformation and deflection.

Foreign Disaster Assistance — who helped write the 69-page "pandemic playbook" the Trump administration blatantly ignored — February, March and April were therefore wasted months in terms of stopping the pandemic or mitigating its damage.

Despite the repeated demands of governors to increase access to testing, the Trump administration failed to respond to this urgent need, just as it failed to capitalize on social distancing in March and April to control the spread of the virus.

Of course, with a president who refuses to wear a mask in the presence of elderly World War II veterans (who are at higher risk of dying of the coronavirus if they contract it), who told Americans that we ought to be researching injecting and inhaling household disinfectants, and who claims to be taking a drug deemed unsafe by the Food and Drug Administration for prophylaxis against the coronavirus, it's clear that Trump is not prioritizing the Americans' lives — and perhaps not even his own life.