Reports: Trump Advisor Warned White House in January of Pandemic Risks
CAMEROTA: We have new details this morning about what the Trump administration knew about coronavirus and when they knew it. Both Axios and "The New York Times" report that White House economic adviser Peter Navarro wrote two separate memos, warning the White House that coronavirus could cost the country trillions of dollars and kill up to two million Americans. That first memo was sent in late January, a the second memo in late February, just days before President Trump was saying this publicly.</s>TRUMP: The coronavirus, which is, you know, very well under control in our country. We're going to be pretty soon at only five people. We're going down, not up. We're going very substantially down, not up. It's going to disappear. One day it's like a miracle, it will disappear.</s>CAMEROTA: We don't know if President Trump actually saw Peter Navarro's memos. Joining us now is one of the reporters behind the Axios story. That's CNN political analyst Margaret Talev. Margaret, great to have you here. So I have so many questions about this, but Peter Navarro, economic advisor to the president, why was he so compelled to begin trying to compile all of this information and sound the alarm?</s>MARGARET TALEV, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Yes, these are really two extraordinary memos because of the detail that they show and also because of the context of the timing. But Peter Navarro often says publicly he's a Ph.D., he's a statistician. And you can see that at work in these memos. He draws out different modeling scenarios and says, look, on the low end, if this is no big deal, it's just a flu and we deal with it, it could run somewhere around, you know, $35 billion a month. But on the high end of it is pandemic. His initial estimates were this could cost 543,000 lives and maybe 4 billion -- $4 trillion. And within a span of about three weeks, he had raised those estimates very high upward, saying it could cost up to 2 million American lives -- pardon me, up to --</s>CAMEROTA: Yes.</s>TALEV: Yes, two million American lives but almost $6 trillion in economic costs.</s>BERMAN: It is extraordinary, and it's detailed, Margaret. It's explicit, and I'll say it in three syllables so people get it, explicit. It spells it out completely. This is P-22 here. "There's an increasing probability of a full-blown COVID-19 pandemic that could infect as many as 100 million Americans with a loss of life of as many as 1 to 2 million souls. We have a graphic for that." We also have P-23. "We can expect to need at least a billion face masks, 200,000 Tyvek suits, 11,000 ventilator circuits, 25,000 PAPRs." I mean, this was written on February 23 from within the White House. So when President Trump has said publicly who could have seen this coming, no one saw this coming, it's just not true. His own White House was putting out paper internally, saying that exactly this was coming.</s>TALEV: But the White House internally has not been in lockstep with this and, in fact, we talked with a senior official last night who said when they saw Peter Navarro's memos, their first thought was, Well, there he goes again on trying to get a China travel ban. So there is -- there was and still is a fair amount of distress about Peter Navarro's motives when he speaks out because of his hawkish history on trade and the China travel ban. And on the other hand, there has been and, to some extent, remains a real divide inside the White House about how to balance health concerns with economic concerns. And you see that play out every day when the president speaks. But this question of was Peter Navarro able to get the president's attention. He's close to the president, president generally likes him. Was he able to get these memos in front of him and read? And you see the difference in the memos. The first memo addressed to the National Security Council. The second memo addressed to a whole bunch of people and the president. So with increasing urgency, he seemed to be trying to tell the president, Hey, I'm going to put this in writing. And the president often doesn't like that. You saw this play out in the debacle over the Navy commander: I'm going to put this in writing, and I'm going to address it to the president himself.</s>CAMEROTA: Well, the president did react, I mean, in terms of the so- called travel ban from China, though, as we now know, there were hundreds of thousands of passengers who were able to come in. But, still, he issued that sort of proclamation. And so maybe that was in response to Peter Navarro's warning?</s>TALEV: Well, we don't know, because then the actions from the podium and from Twitter and from what were still rallies at the tie were so dramatically different. The president saying, We've got this under control. It's not that many people. Look at the stock market's performance. So you saw, to some extent, direct acknowledgment by the president in his policies. His team began working to move forward on stimulus packages with Congress, as you said, efforts to keep even Americans who may have been exposed from coming back off of cruise ships and airplanes. So the president was privately concerned about it and, to some extent, showed that in policy; but it did not translate into the public message or what he was telling Americans just living, going about their everyday business, about how seriously to take the risk that this could come to their communities.</s>CAMEROTA: Margaret Talev, thank you very much for sharing your reporting. We will obviously continue to dive into that. Now to this story. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson remains in intensive care after his coronavirus symptoms worsened yesterday. The latest on how he's doing in a live report from London, next.