IT IS a situation that seems all too familiar now. An elusive enemy strikes a nation with limitless economic potential. The shockwaves rock the very corridors of power. The attacker came from a malign, faraway place that few have seen and even fewer understand. There is plenty of blame to go around. Clouds of suspicion descend; first upon strangers, then on neighbors and friends. Those fortunate enough to withstand the attack grieve at first, then retreat to their political camps. Unanswered questions abound, and soon the victims’ indignation transforms into seething anger and resentment. Volunteers selflessly plunge themselves into the fray to cleanse the human wreckage and ease the suffering. Many who respond to the call give their lives. To reassure its citizens, the stricken government spends billions fortifying common spaces, transportation systems, and airports. Congress quickly acts, approving millions more for future mass casualty incidents, from chemical and biological sources. State and federal officials soon cast their watchful eyes everywhere, searching for when the enemy might strike next. A once mighty nation bolts itself inside, sinks into despair, and reconsiders its place in the world.

The images from that time are still fresh. From a wounded Pentagon, the gray smoke curls. Investigators pour over the remains of United 93 strewn across a field in rural Pennsylvania. The drums of war on September 11, 2001 were beating, but hope sprang forth. America would fight and survive. In a show of bipartisanship rarely seen these days, weary but unbowed legislators joined hands in solidarity on Capitol Hill, singing “God Bless America.” Atop the twisted girders of New York City’s Twin Towers, President George W. Bush channeled the country’s frustration through a bullhorn, flanked by New York’s Bravest. “I can hear you,” he shouted into a crowd. “The rest of the world hears you. And the people that knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!” This was the story of that sunny Tuesday morning—the day America, the sole superpower, was laid low.

Presidents have faced uncontrollable catastrophes in the past, but all of them have reacted similarly. To end inequality and to bring about a Great Society, Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty. Richard Nixon declared war on cancer to stop sickness and death. Ronald Reagan declared war on drugs to end the scourge of addiction. And in the hope that Al Qaeda and Islamists everywhere never strike America again, George W. Bush declared global war on terrorism.

Now, not to be outdone, President Donald Trump declared war on March 18, 2020 on an “invisible enemy”—COVID-19, the novel coronavirus; a deadly, highly contagious form of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome from Wuhan, China.

War metaphors galvanize an aggrieved society against enemies seen and unseen. Now a self-described wartime president, Trump used his words to convey strength and impart a sense of terrible urgency about the coronavirus pandemic. They reflect the president’s proclivity to throw up the barricades when something foreign or offensive approaches. His words also convey that danger continues to lurk about, so big changes are on the way. The road to this point, however, has been a tortuous one, paved with many denials and diversions along the way.

HIGH-LEVEL dispatches to the president gathered steam with a November 2019 National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI) report that detailed the contagion’s spread through Wuhan. The NCMI briefed its leaders at the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Joint Staff, and the White House National Security Council (NSC) a month later. The administration had ample intelligence on the Wuhan situation, and it knew China was covering up the infection’s full scale. By January and February, the system was blinking red. The Intelligence Community presented more than a dozen coronavirus warnings in the President’s Daily Brief—the same publication in which CIA analysts foretold Osama bin Laden’s determination to strike the United States in August 2001.

The NSC acted on the NCMI’s intelligence. It recommended to Trump that Americans should stay home from work and dense metropolises where viruses thrive ought to close. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) alerted the public on January 17. It was monitoring international airports in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York, where large numbers of travelers fly in from China. Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Alex Azar, who led the department in the 9/11 aftermath, hurriedly raised warning flags twice that month. Despite assurances his experts were working to contain the problem, the president brushed Azar off, saying he was being “alarmist.” Almost a week later, a Seattle man who had recently traveled to Wuhan was the first known U.S. citizen diagnosed with coronavirus. The most definite sign something was amiss came on January 23. In a struggle to contain COVID-19’s spread, President Xi Jinping shut down Hubei Province, an area the size of North Dakota surrounding the city of Wuhan, two days before Chinese New Year. Beijing’s bustling city life in early February slowed to an eerie crawl after authorities suspended all modes of mass transit.

None of this registered with Trump. His focus was elsewhere. During this critical period, the president was in Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum. The U.S. Senate was just weeks away from acquitting him of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, and trade negotiations with China were ongoing. Embarrassing Xi with talk of an uncontrollable virus would have been counterproductive. Trump, noticeably, pinned his hopes for reelection on a booming economy. Acknowledging the possibility of a pandemic could potentially spark a downturn that could render millions jobless. A CNBC reporter asked the president if he was concerned about a pandemic. He replied: “No. Not at all. And we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming from China … it’s going to be just fine.”

On January 31, Secretary Azar imposed the president’s preemptive ban on all foreigners who traveled to China over the past two weeks. By then, stockpiles of protective masks and equipment were already depleted. Functioning CDC testing kits and ventilators were also in dangerously short supply by the end of February. Trump has since touted this travel ban on China as a decisive move against the coronavirus. While it is true that the ban may have bought America some critical time to prepare for the oncoming storm, this time was not used wisely. Moreover, Trump had ample warning before that point to build stockpiles of tests and protective equipment. Almost one year earlier, former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Dan Coats’ Annual Threat Assessment foretold the United States’ vulnerability to a pandemic could lead to “massive rates of death and disability.” The former DNI’s words were prescient in hindsight. Other forecasts in the forty-two-page document—specifically, those about Russia’s determination to meddle in the 2020 election—enraged Trump as the impeachment inquiry lengthened into a trial. After delivering his report to the Senate Intelligence Committee—headed by Senator Richard Burr—Coats resigned on July 28, 2019. It is worth noting that, since then, Burr, who was privy to sensitive coronavirus briefings prior to the virus’ arrival in the United States, did not warn the public to prepare for the possible consequences of the pandemic. Instead, there is evidence that he acted on this information and sold over $1 million in stocks before the market crashed in March. He has since stepped down as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and is under investigation by the Department of Justice for insider training.

With the ban in place, Trump dawdled until mid-March. Then, at last, a seeming breakthrough. To answer the states’ pleas for coronavirus tests, the president, during a Rose Garden news conference, announced a partnership between Google and big-box retailers such as Walmart and Target. A website, developed by 1,700 engineers, would determine if patients required testing, and direct them to testing sites set up in parking lots all over the country. The dramatic announcement caught Google executives entirely by surprise. Verily, a Google subsidiary, was developing a drive-through testing unit, but only for a handful of counties in California. The president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, operating separately from the vice president’s Coronavirus Task Force, was working on a similar application through a family-owned health care company. Neither endeavor was ready for nationwide deployment.

TRUMP FINALLY declared his war, though the facts overtook his aspirations, and the time for preparation had run out. With more than a hundred deaths and 13,000 reported cases on March 19, the contagion was spreading inexorably into homes and hospitals in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. And yet, against the expert medical advice of Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Dr. Deborah Birx, the U.S. Global AIDs Coordinator—both with decades of experience in the spread of fatal illnesses and HIV-AIDs—the president said the coronavirus would disappear like “a miracle” and the nation would be back to normal by Easter.

In the ensuing days, Trump played master of ceremonies for a coterie of businessmen, singing their praises. He doubled as his own press secretary. Sometimes he was an amateur clinician, touting the dubious curative properties of anti-malarial drugs. There had been so much misinformation coming from the president that major networks and cable news outlets considered cutting their coverage short, even though Trump, citing a New York Times report over Twitter, claimed his ratings have been better than Monday Night Football and The Bachelor season finale.

While the war of words between the president and the press has been cringeworthy, some distressing facts have glaringly stood out. A University of Washington statistical model suggests the virus’ final death toll will exceed 130,000 by August—far more than 9/11 and our wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam. Coronavirus testing lagged early on because of defective CDC kits; however, at the time of writing, the nation is testing 400,000 people a day. If this rate continues, the administration could test more than 3 percent of the U.S. population per month.

Earlier intelligence-driven testing and quarantine of foreign travelers entering the United States could have reduced the spread of infection. Funding cuts for infectious disease research projects also played a part. In September 2019, just two months before signs of the pandemic first appeared in Wuhan, the U.S. Agency for International Development ended PREDICT funding. This early warning system had a decade-long track record of discovering pathogenic hotspots and increasing our understanding of how coronaviruses leap from the animals to humans. Eliminating government-funded programs that increase international awareness of infectious disease probably seemed fiscally prudent at the moment, but their demise radically reduced our understanding of the virologic world beyond our shores. A decision like PREDICT was made out of political expediency, and it gets to the heart of how the world’s most prosperous country mismanaged the pandemic.

ACCORDING TO a Pew poll, in the 1960s seven in ten Americans believed that their government does the right things most of the time. Following the excesses of Vietnam and Watergate, attitudes took a turn downward. As Reagan-era populism took hold in the 1980s, Americans saw government and its sprawling institutions as the source of the nation’s problems rather than as a possible solution. Presidents and legislators, over the course of administrations, fought over how and when to use free-market principles to cut things down to size. Politicians, in short, ran government like a business and did a poor job of it. The proof is in the same Pew poll: just 17 percent of Americans believe that their government is trustworthy enough to do what is right most of the time.

Yet it is not just this free-market impulse that has harmed both the government and Americans’ perception of it. Uncomfortable as it may be to admit, there are signs of sclerosis and failure in the very institutions we turn to during crises. These are problems that span presidential administrations and require more critical examination. Consider the CDC and Food and Drug Administration (FDA), for example: the former bungled its own testing kit, costing the public a crucial three weeks of precious time and health authorities the ability to determine where and how quickly the virus was spreading, while the latter did not allow non-government labs to create their own testing kits until the end of February.

To rebuild trustworthiness, our leaders have to get back to basics. A government’s first duty is to protect its people and reasonably provide for their health, safety, and well-being. In A Time to Build, Yuval Levin says institutions are supposed to be forges of integrity and professionalism, not platforms people use to promote personal interests or a political brand. The guarantors of these first duties are federal health and emergency management institutions, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies. Levin writes that an institution loses trust “when it plainly fails to protect us, or even actively betrays our confidence, in the performance of its work—as when a bank cheats its customers, or a member of the clergy abuses a child.” Public servants, who intermingle government work with personal business interests, also erode institutional trust.

No one doubts since 9/11 that Washington’s ways have been downright messy—and perpetually getting messier. Years of continuing resolutions, budget caps, and partisan gridlock have added uncertainty to reauthorizing emergency response legislation or drafting new laws. Congress’ support for hospitals’ surge funding, like the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness and Advancing Innovation Act, has slipped year after year. Inversely, some political dependencies also contribute to the mess—the CDC and FDA, two agencies with missions that are supposed to transcend petty politicking, are led by appointees instead of holding Federal Reserve-like independence from whatever the president might be tweeting about. And, over the last decade, the United States has off-shored 90 percent of its personal protective equipment industry. Many of the active pharmaceuticals for our life-saving medicines are now manufactured in China, India, and other nations.

A Coronavirus Commission—like the 9/11 Commission—would account for all the preceding factors with testimonials and an authoritative timeline of what exactly happened. For his level-headed and empirical approach to managing coronavirus in his state, New York governor Andrew Cuomo is an ideal chairman. His senior deputies would be the former heads of HHS, CDC, FDA, the Department of Homeland Security, or the various intelligence agencies. Career staffers from Capitol Hill are resourceful information gathers. To avoid partisanship, highly-experienced, apolitical government ombudsmen from the medical and intelligence fields, as well as academia, can get the job done just as handily.

This is a task that will take time. It took two years and eight dozen hard-working people to churn out an honest appraisal of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies’ shortcomings after 9/11. The new commission’s investigation could take just as long, but it is worth the effort. A renaissance in how the people see and respect their government is at stake. Our country owes a debt to a new class of everyday heroes—the emergency ward doctors and nurses treating the ill, the shippers and packers who keep our economy alive, and the grocery clerks who stock our pantries. It is up to Congress, using its investigative powers, to clearly transmit a responsible bipartisan assessment of the pandemic, and to let America know how it proposes to prevent another devastating public health crisis from ever happening again.

William Giannetti was a staff assistant to a Congressional probe that examined the FBI’s post-9/11 intelligence reforms. The views in this article do not represent those of the FBI or the U.S. government.

Image: Reuters.