Vox reports:

The Trump administration’s failures in dealing with a global pandemic threat raise a frightening, but important, question: How else is this administration putting the United States at risk right now? And what is this administration neglecting in 2020 that will put Americans at risk five, 10, 20 years from now?

In 2017, Michael Lewis, author of books like The Big Short, Moneyball, and The Blind Side, began asking these very same questions — and arrived at some startling conclusions. “The United States government,” he writes, “manages the biggest portfolio of [catastrophic] risks ever managed by a single institution in the history of the world.” And that means the US president is, above all, the risk-manager-in-chief. “Some of the things any incoming president should worry about are fast moving: pandemics, hurricanes, terrorist attacks,” writes Lewis. “But most are not. Most are like bombs with very long fuses that, in the distant future, when the fuse reaches the bomb, might or might not explode.”

In his most recent book, The Fifth Risk, Lewis explores the different ways the US government manages its “vast portfolio” of risks — and how the Trump administration has systematically and purposefully undermined that effort. I spoke to Lewis about what the US government’s risk portfolio looks like, why Donald Trump’s leadership puts us all in danger, how undermining trust may be the biggest risk of them all, and more. [Continue reading…]