Trump's approach to the 2014 Ebola outbreak offered a preview of his coronavirus response. He spread false info, attacked rivals, and tweeted through the whole thing.

• President Donald Trump has treated the coronavirus pandemic like a political opportunity, which has had disastrous consequences. His approach to the 2014 Ebola outbreak offered a preview of what was to come in 2020.
• In 2014, Trump ignored public health experts on Ebola, while relentlessly criticizing President Barack Obama via Twitter.
• Trump has taken a near-identical approach to coronavirus by consistently contradicting his own medical experts while attempting to scapegoat others for his own failures.
• Despite Trump's efforts to whip up hysteria in 2014, there were less than a dozen cases of Ebola in the US linked to the epidemic.
• As of Tuesday, there were well over 1.1 million cases of COVID-19 in the US. Trump early on claimed that the number of cases would drop down "close to zero" in a matter of days.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The 2014 Ebola outbreak devastated countries in West Africa, but barely touched the US. As frightening as it was, the outbreak never posed a significant threat to Americans. But that did not stop Donald Trump from attempting to whip up hysteria about the outbreak while accusing President Barack Obama of putting the country in danger.

Though Trump has taken a different tone during the coronavirus pandemic, frequently downplaying the threat or painting a death toll worse than US losses in Vietnam as a success, the president's handling of this crisis bears many parallels to his approach to Ebola.

In 2014, his rhetoric on Ebola contradicted public health experts and was designed to mislead the public and tarnish political rivals.

Fast-forward to 2020, and he's taken a near-identical approach. Trump downplayed the threat of coronavirus for weeks, and has since made numerous, easily-disproven statements on the pandemic and its impact. Perhaps most notably, Trump in late April dangerously suggested Americans might be able to inject disinfectant to cure themselves of the virus. Once the virus began to spread at scale, and Americans started to die at a startling rate, Trump falsely stated he "always" took the threat seriously as he's looked for scapegoats to deflect from his own failures.

Trump has even erroneously blamed Obama for issues with testing kits for coronavirus, which did not exist until late 2019 (three years into Trump's presidency).

The president's aversion to facts and expertise was on display on 2014, and has been again in 2020

During a 2014 interview with Fox & Friends, Trump dismissed assertions from public health experts that Ebola was "hard to catch" and "not very contagious." This was false, and went against what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was telling the American public at the time. The director of the CDC in 2014, Thomas Frieden, said he had "no doubt that we will control this importation or case of Ebola so it does not spread widely in this the country."

Comparatively, as the CDC in late February 2020 warned that coronavirus cases would increase and Americans should prepare for "severe" disruptions, Trump said that the number of cases in the US could be "close to zero" in a "couple of days."

Trump said the US had everything under control, offering the public a false sense of security.

The US is now the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, with the most reported cases and confirmed fatalities in the world.

Trump also repeatedly compared COVID-19 to the flu in the early days of the outbreak, even as top medical experts — including those on the White House coronavirus task force — warned that the virus had a much higher mortality rate than the seasonal flu.

The tweeter-in-chief

During both the 2014 Ebola outbreak and now the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, Trump spent a great deal of his time attacking rivals on Twitter.

Trump, who played golf on more than one occasion in the early days of the coronavirus outbreak, went after Obama for doing the same in 2014.

But a lot of his tweets in those days called for shutting down travel from West Africa to the US, as he simultaneously criticized Obama for sending US troops to the region to help with the epidemic.

Not much has changed since then, as Trump during coronavirus continues to use Twitter as a means of bashing critics and opponents, while spreading fear about foreigners and pushing against global cooperation. On Monday night, the president went after a conservative group that's pushing against his reelection. In the process, Trump referred to the husband of one of his top advisers, Kellyanne Conway, as a "deranged loser" and "moonface."

In 2014, when Trump was still a private citizen, he tweeted about Ebola over 80 times. In 2020, as president, he's tweeted about coronavirus roughly 70 times.

With both Ebola in 2014 and coronavirus in 2020, Trump treated public health crises as political opportunities. As a private citizen, the impact Trump could have in this regard was limited. As president, the effects of this approach to a deadly virus have been catastrophic, with tens of thousands dead and millions unemployed in a matter of weeks.

In total, despite the panic Trump attempted to spread, just 11 people were treated for Ebola in the US during the 2014-2016 epidemic. As of Tuesday morning, there were nearly 70,000 deaths from coronavirus in the US, and well over 1.1 million cases.