President Donald Trump is not exactly increasing his base of support with his floundering response to the Coronavirus crisis. A new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll released on Wednesday has a full 52 percent of respondents saying that they believe that former President Barack Obama would handle responding to the Coronavirus better than Trump. In stark contrast, a mere 38 percent of respondents said that they thought Trump would be better than Obama at handling the crisis upheaval. That gives Obama a full 14 percent lead, which doesn’t exactly bode well for Trump heading into the November election.
In the past, Trump has tried to blame his administration’s own Coronavirus response stumbling on Obama. He’s claimed that the U.S. inherited faulty tests — but the Coronavirus was not detected before the current outbreak, and therefore, no tests even existed, let alone faulty ones. Trump is just pulling things out of thin air.
At a recent press conference, he claimed to reporters:
‘We’re doing a great job. I inherited — we, this administration, we inherited a broken system, both militarily, where we’ve rebuilt our military… we now have so much ammunition we don’t know what to do with it, and that’s a nice feeling to have, but they also gave us empty cupboards. The cupboards were bare… so we took over a stockpile where the cupboard was bare, and where the testing system was broken and old, and we redid it. And frankly, it would be okay for a small event, but not for a big event.’
Trump tries to pin blame for his coronavirus failures to Obama and George W Bush pic.twitter.com/DAtpxIv9ga
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 6, 2020
If his team is really doing such a great job, then why has the president been so feverishly freaking out about a report from the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services that outlines medical supply issues around the country? It’s just the facts, and Trump has wound himself up into a rage.
Trump's assault on Inspectors General is designed to intimidate any who would impede or shed light on his misconduct.
Note the targets:
– IC IG who received whistleblower report
– HHS IG who identified hospitals needing more COVID testing
– IG who would oversee COVID loan funds https://t.co/Utpu4zvHMH— Rep. Don Beyer (@RepDonBeyer) April 7, 2020
Trump’s assertion that the Obama administration “never did anything” to prepare the U.S. for a potential pandemic is completely false. In fact, the Obama administration even developed a play-by-play guidebook for pandemic response in the wake of the swine flu outbreak — the death toll from which, it’s worth noting, seems like it may end up lower than the U.S. Coronavirus death toll. The Trump administration flatly ignored that Coronavirus response guide, which was in the form of a document held at the National Security Council. Trump also eliminated the pandemic response unit from the National Security Council, which the Obama administration had implemented.
The Trump administration was given a step-by-step guide of what to do during a pandemic—they ignored it. Coronavirus has killed more than 1,000 Americans already. https://t.co/mg0rrpit1A
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) March 26, 2020
The Coronavirus seems likely to weigh on the November presidential election, when Trump seems likely to face former Vice President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee. 44 percent of respondents in the new POLITICO poll said that they thought Trump is leading better amidst the outbreak than Biden, while just 36 percent of respondents said the opposite and opted for Biden. Still, a full 50 percent of respondents in the same poll said that they believe Trump has not done enough to combat the Coronavirus outbreak. Only 38 percent of respondents said they think Trump has done enough — not exactly a winning coalition!
