Trump adviser Navarro defends US response in angry CBS interview

Trump’s coronavirus tsar Peter Navarro defended the administration’s pandemic response on CBS on Sunday night, angrily challenging his hosts to show him how they had covered pandemic preparations under previous administrations.

So 60 Minutes did.

“I challenge you,” said Navarro, “show me the 60 Minutes episode a year ago, two years ago, or during the Obama administration, during the Bush administration that said, ‘Hey, global pandemic’s coming, you gotta do X, Y and Z, and, by the way, we gotta shut down the economy to fight it.

“Show me that episode. Then you’ll have some credence in terms of attacking the Trump administration for not being prepared.”

60 Minutes duly ran clips from a 2009 feature on the fight against H1N1, or swine flu – “a pandemic, meaning it’s a global epidemic, the first flu pandemic in 41 years” – and a 2005 section on H5N1, or avian flu, which the show said had “the potential to cause an influenza pandemic similar to the one that killed 50 million people in 1918”.

The 2005 piece included an interview with Dr Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who is now a leading public health expert in the Trump White House, under increasing fire from the president.

“I don’t see it as an exercise because it could be the big one,” Fauci said then, of preparations being pursued by the federal government. “It could be, and if it is our rushing around doing what we need to do, pushing the envelope is not for nought or in vain.”

Navarro is a China hawk and trade adviser with a checkered political past. Last month, Trump named him Defense Production Act policy coordinator, in charge of enforcing the production of masks, PPE, ventilators and other badly needed medical supplies as the coronavirus, Covid-19, spreads throughout the US.

According to Johns Hopkins University, by Monday nearly 560,000 cases had been confirmed in the US and more than 22,000 people had died. In New York state, more than three times as many people have died as were killed on 9/11. Nationally, experts currently expect 60,000 deaths by August. The US economy remains shuttered, and unemployment is soaring.

Trump’s lack of preparation and failure to respond quickly has been relentlessly examined in the media, with Navarro among advisers reported to have warned the president of the potentially catastrophic nature of the approaching pandemic.

But when the 60 Minutes host Bill Whitaker challenged Navarro about claims by Trump among others that nobody could have anticipated the outbreak, Navarro responded pugnaciously.

“Let me push back a little bit on that,” he said. “I don’t know what you mean. It’s like an intelligence agency said a global pandemic could happen. I mean, I’m sure they’ve been saying that for decades and nobody took them seriously. Why? Well, black swans are hard to sell and this was the 500-year flood. This hasn’t happened since 1917.”

Then he issued his fateful challenge.