Trump says he didn’t know of, still hasn’t seen Navarro memos on possible pandemic

President Donald Trump on Monday 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.

At the White House during a coronavirus task force news briefing, the president said he’d learned of Peter Navarro’s memos, the contents of which were first disclosed on Monday night, only a few days ago, but he asserted that the documents lined up with his travel restrictions for foreigners coming from China.

“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 U.S. 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 Jan. 29, Navarro, a notorious China hawk, argued for an immediate ban on travel from China, then the epicenter 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 U.S. at that date, Trump publicly continued to downplay the severity of the threat.

Navarro’s Jan. 29 memo warned that without “aggressive” containment measures like the travel ban that he advocated, the cost to the U.S. economy could soar to nearly $6 trillion, compared with an economic hit of $2.9 billion to $34.6 billion a month with a travel ban in place. The memo also laid out an estimated death toll of up to half a million Americans.

The second memo was dated Feb. 23 and addressed to the president directly through the offices of the National Security Council, Trump’s chief of staff and the White House coronavirus task force. That document outlined a request for an “immediate” supplemental appropriation of at least $3 billion. The White House’s first supplemental aid request to Congress, which came days after Navarro’s memo, was drawn down to $2.5 billion, though lawmakers rejected that sum and gave the administration $8 billion to deal with the burgeoning crisis.

“There is 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 1-2 million souls,” the memo warned, referring to the respiratory illness caused by the novel coronavirus. It also laid out the levels of expected need for the kinds of medical supplies health care providers have been pleading desperately for over the past few weeks.

Despite the warnings contained in Navarro’s memos, Trump has been insistent in recent weeks that no one “could have known” about the threat posed by the virus, while also asserting that he’d known all along that the initial outbreak in China could have morphed into a global pandemic.

Trump sought on Tuesday evening to explain his seemingly contradictory stances by arguing that he didn’t want to panic the country.

“Cases really didn’t build up [in the U.S.] for a while, but you have to understand, I'm a cheerleader for this country. I don’t want to create havoc and shock and everything else,” he said, noting that “ultimately when I was saying that, I am also closing it down.”

“I obviously was concerned about it because I closed down our country to China, which was heavily infected,” Trump added.

The president told reporters he still had not seen Navarro’s memos, but denied that his administration’s early response, which has been widely panned, would have changed if he’d known about them.

“I don’t think it would’ve changed,” he said. “I basically did what the memo said and the memo was, you know, the memo was a pretty good memo from the standpoint that he talked, I guess — I didn’t see it yet.”

Ultimately, Trump concluded, it didn’t matter whether he’d seen the memos.

“He wrote a memo and he was right and I haven’t seen the memo,” the president said. “I will see it later on, after this. But it didn’t matter whether I saw or not, because I acted on my own. I guess I had the same instincts as Peter.”