Politico | Coronavirus: Trump says he didn’t know of, still hasn’t seen Navarro memos on possible pandemic
- But the president asserted that his trade adviser’s documents lined up with his travel restrictions for foreigners coming from China
This story is published in a content partnership with POLITICO. It was originally reported by Caitlin Oprysko on politico.com on April 7, 2020.
US President Donald Trump denied that he’d ever seen a handful of memos, written and circulated through the White House by his top trade adviser beginning in January, that warned the coronavirus could cost the country trillions of dollars and imperil the lives of millions of Americans.
“I didn’t see them. I didn’t look for them,” Trump told reporters.
Navarro’s memos laid out in stark terms the catastrophic toll the virus could have – both on American lives and the US economy – and prescribed a number of containment measures that might have seemed drastic at the time but that ultimately came to fruition.
In the first memo, dated January 29, Navarro, a notorious China hawk, argued for an immediate ban on travel from China, then the epicentre of the outbreak. It was a seemingly drastic step that Trump took days later. Though the president has held up the travel ban as evidence that he took the virus seriously from the beginning, and there were confirmed cases of coronavirus in the US at that date, Trump publicly continued to downplay the severity of the threat.