Once China informed the world of a disease outbreak on December 31, 2019, the Trump Administration's response was marked by downplaying the threat, inaction or partial measures, confusion, and inaccurate public statements. 711), and a Columbia University report conservatively estimated that between 130,000 and 210,000 deaths were attributable to the failures of the US government (Redlener et al., 2020). An assessment published in the Lancet in February 2021 concluded that 40 percent of the COVID‐19 fatalities up to that point could have been averted (Woolhandler et al., 2021, p. Multiple studies have concluded that many of the deaths in the US were avoidable. With over 400,000 deaths in the US as a result of COVID‐19, at the time Trump left office, this assessment appears tragically prescient. Warnings were regularly made in the media (e.g., Yong, 2018), by prominent individuals, such as Bill Gates in a widely viewed 2015 TED talk, and by Trump's own experts, who predicted, based on a 2019 influenza simulation, that the US would be underprepared, underfunded, and would be unable to respond effectively to a pandemic. Based on past outbreaks (SARS, H5N1 avian influenza, Swine flu, MERS, Ebola, Zika) and regular expert warnings (John Hopkins Center for Health Security, 2019 National Intelligence Council, 2012, 2017 WEF, 2019, 2020), a pandemic was viewed as a high probability and even overdue event within the expert community. Like other infamous examples of alleged “surprises” in American history-for example, Pearl Harbor, Sputnik, the 2001 9/11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, and the 2008 financial crisis-the pandemic was anticipated. Such statements could easily be dismissed as self‐serving political rhetoric, but for the fact that not only the words but also the substance of the Trump administration's policy reaction to the pandemic suggest a tragic failure to proactively mount a focused, whole‐of‐government and whole‐of‐society response to indications of a rapidly intensifying public health threat. Furthermore, in spite of the fact that he had received abundant warnings, President Trump regularly asserted in his Coronavirus Task Force press briefings that “nobody could have known a thing like this could happen” (White House, 2020b). Nobody's ever seen anything like this before” (White House, 2020a). Yet, despite these insights, decades of preparedness work, and considerable investment, President Trump, in March 2020, claimed, “Nobody knew there'd be a pandemic or an epidemic of this proportion. While the pandemic came as a rude awakening to many nonspecialists, the predominant view among health security professionals was that the question was not whether but when the next major pandemic or public health emergency would strike. In the US alone, the horrifying costs of the pandemic can be measured in the millions of Americans infected with SARS‐CoV‐2 and the many hundreds of thousands confirmed dead with or from COVID‐19 to date (Johns Hopkins University, 2022). The deadly havoc unleashed by the COVID‐19 pandemic has occupied center stage around the world since 2020. The paper concludes by addressing the crucial role of executive leadership as an underlying factor in all three perspectives and discussing why the US president is ultimately responsible for ensuring a healthy policy process to guard against the pathologies implicated in the federal government's sub‐optimal response to the COVID‐19 crisis. The analysis highlights the extent to which the factors identified by previous studies of policy surprise and failure in other security domains are relevant for health security. Through an empirical exploration guided by three explanatory perspectives-psychological, bureau‐organizational, and agenda‐political-developed from the strategic surprise, public administration, and crisis management literature, the authors seek to shed light on the mechanisms that contributed to the underestimation of the coronavirus threat by the Trump Administration and the slow and mismanaged federal response. This article examines the Trump Administration's inability to mount a timely and effective response to the COVID‐19 outbreak, despite ample warning.
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