The ‘nightmare scenario’ response to the pandemic

Two Post journalists, Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta, spent months reporting on the chaos inside the White House during the Trump administration’s pandemic response. Revelations include details about how sick President Trump really was and his proposal to send infected Americans to Guantánamo. All of this reporting is in their new book “Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration's Response to the Pandemic That Changed History,” out Tuesday. 

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Over the past few months, Post reporters Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta have been looking back to the early days of the pandemic in the United States and at the nightmare scenario that played out when covid-19 and an underprepared federal government collided.

“There was so much going on behind the scenes that Americans didn’t realize,” says Paletta.

As members of the Trump administration jockeyed for power on the coronavirus task force and debated the politics of mask wearing, the coronavirus was ripping through the country. Paletta and Abutaleb report that the crux of the pandemic came down to that unprepared, disorganized federal response.

Their new book is “Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration's Response to the Pandemic That Changed History.”