President Donald Trump has been largely struggling through his administration’s response to the Coronavirus pandemic, and figures like Hillary Clinton have been filling in the leadership gap. This weekend, she shared a video message from the Obama administration’s Ebola response coordinator Ron Klain, who outlined both the ways in which the Trump administration has come up short and the ways in which others — like a potential Democrat in the White House post-November — could fix the problem. These solutions range from careful personal hygiene practices to increased assistance for struggling health care professionals.
Clinton shared:
‘Highly recommend watching this:’
In the video, Klain shares the following while recounting the lead-up to how the Coronavirus outbreak got so precarious:
‘Some countries acted quickly. What did President Trump do? He downplayed it… Trump’s slow response to this crisis is no surprise… The Coronavirus is not Donald Trump’s fault. But the fact that our country was not ready for it, and that it responded so slowly — well, President Trump says he bears no responsibility for that, but the responsibility falls squarely on his shoulders.’
Highly recommend watching this: https://t.co/Dh0RbE16c0
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) March 21, 2020
It’s true — in one example clip included in the footage, Trump insists that the virus will disappear like a “miracle.” Indicating that all along, he was concerned about the public image impact on his administration, he went on to much more recently freak out on NBC reporter Peter Alexander for the simple question of what he’d say to scared Americans. The notion of them was too much for him.
In the video, Klain goes on to recount a litany of Trump’s failures in dealing with the pandemic. Besides his closure of the National Security Council team specifically tasked with dealing with pandemics, which Klain mentioned, Trump also had what he called a “don’t test, don’t tell” mindset, which is evidenced by his repeated public assertions earlier this year that the Coronavirus would simply vanish essentially on its own. Trump had no evidence for this claim, but he glibly made it anyway.
Klain even notes that the day after the CDC’s Dr. Nancy Messonier pronounced that a Coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. was no longer a question of if but when, she stopped appearing at Coronavirus task force press conferences at the White House.
Check out Twitter’s response below…
