President Donald Trump gives a press briefing on the coronavirus at the White House on March 16, 2020.
- In the days before President Donald Trump was inaugurated, outgoing Obama administration officials trained his incoming administration on how to deal with a global pandemic.
- Politico obtained documents on the meeting, and spoke to more than a dozen people who attended the training, which was described as "weird" at best.
- One Trump Cabinet member, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, reportedly dozed off, and others questioned why they had to be there.
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When President Donald Trump visited the CDC earlier this month, as coronavirus cases were accelerating in the US, he remarked that "you can never really think" that something like this might happen.
But it turns out that the Obama administration did think this was something Trump could face in office, and took steps to brief his appointees on how to respond to an outbreak before he took over in 2017.
Politico obtained documents from that legally-mandated training, and spoke to more than a dozen people who attended the meeting, from the Obama and Trump sides.
Obama officials, they said, explained what the Trump administration would have to do when faced with a hypothetical pandemic, the factors of which were similar to the coronavirus.
The model scenario was an outbreak that crops up in Asia and spreads to the US, and exposes problems like a shortage of ventilators and anti-viral drugs.
While most of the Trump officials paid attention, others tuned out and questioned why they had to be there, according to the sources who spoke to Politico.
During the transition from the Obama to Trump administrations, a training was held to get the president-elect's appointees up to speed on how to respond to a pandemic. Presidents Obama and Trump are seen shaking hands on Trump's Inauguration day in January 2017.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross is said to have dozed off at points during the three-hour training.
A senior Obama administration official said he and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos were "especially dismissive in conversations on the sidelines of the session."
(Ross' spokesperson denied the allegation that he fell asleep, saying he "found the meeting quite interesting and informative." DeVos' spokesperson said "this is nothing more than a hit piece with no basis on reality.")
"There were people who were there who said, 'This is really stupid and why do we need to be here,'" a senior Obama administration official who attended told Politico.
The negativity didn't just come from the Obama administration sources.
When asked whether any of the information from the session made its way up to the president-elect, a former senior Trump official wasn't sure.
But they said hypotheticals like that were not "the kind of thing that really interested the president very much."
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross (pictured above on March 10) is said to have dozed off at points during the three-hour pandemic training.
"He was never interested in things that might happen. He's totally focused on the stock market, the economy and always bashing his predecessor and giving him no credit," the source said.
"The possibility things were things he didn't spend much time on or show much interest in.
The Trump administration has faced strong criticism for its handling of the outbreak - from a lack of coronavirus testing kits, to Trump's repeated misstatements of fact at press conferences.
As Politico pointed out, one of the challenges of the training was the fact that Trump's appointees by and large did not have governmental experience.
"The problem is that they came in very arrogant and convinced that they knew more than the outgoing administration - full swagger," another former Obama official told Politico.
Another issue is the high turnover in the administration meant that about two-thirds of the people who attended the training had left the White House by the time of the coronavirus outbreak.
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