Staggeringly, Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow claimed during an appearance on ABC’s This Week over the weekend that he does not understand how someone like former President Barack Obama can criticize the Trump team’s response to the Coronavirus pandemic. The United States has suffered over 80,000 Coronavirus deaths, and the rate of infection has been many times more than that seen in other places like South Korea, and Kudlow still insists that the Trump administration is actually doing a great job with their Coronavirus response. That’s just staggeringly ludicrous.
Asked about Obama’s recent insistence on a leaked private conference call that the Trump administration has developed an “absolute chaotic disaster” while responding to the Coronavirus, Kudlow insisted:
‘With all due respect to the former president… I don’t know what he’s talking about. With all the assistance we’ve done, with all the infrastructure that we, the Trump administration, working with governors and mayors and with Congress, with respect to testing, with respect to all manner of PPE and medical equipment, with respect to ventilators.’
Kudlow’s examples of the Trump administration’s supposed great job don’t prove what he thinks they do.
In fact, medical personnel around the U.S. have struggled with shortages of personal protective equipment throughout the pandemic. Those shortages, which were outlined by an official at the Department of Health and Human Services who Trump quickly fired, put medical personnel’s lives at risk because they’re left unable to effectively protect themselves from the virus. Also — Trump has claimed in the past that anyone who wants a Coronavirus test could get one, but to say that the U.S. testing rate has been slow to catch up to other areas would be an understatement. The U.S. took weeks, wasting valuable time that could have been used against the virus.
Adding that Trump has supposedly made “great use of the private sector,” Kudlow continued during his ABC appearance:
‘I don’t understand what President Obama is saying. It just sounds so darn political to me. What we’ve done may not be 100 percent perfect. You know, these things happen once every 100 years. But the overall picture is we’ve created a massive health and safety infrastructure to deal with the pandemic here in the United States, and judging by the results, where there has been a flattening in the rate of infection rates and mortality rates, it’s working.’
Watch below:
Larry Kudlow says Obama's criticism of federal response to COVID-19 “sounds so darn political.”
While it “may not be 100 percent perfect,” we “created a massive health and safety infrastructure” to deal with the pandemic and “it’s working,” Kudlow adds. https://t.co/NX6cyzXxZl pic.twitter.com/uTk571lrT8
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) May 10, 2020
An average of 1,500 or more Americans have been dying each and every day due to the Coronavirus for over a month, and tens of thousands of new cases have been confirmed alongside those deaths each and every day in the United States. Is that seriously what Kudlow calls a “working” Coronavirus response? Does he want to tell the families who’ve lost loved ones in the wake of Trump’s brazen inaction that the president is actually doing a really great job?
The hefty tolls that the U.S. has faced were not inevitable. The president could have acted quicker to secure the country against the virus, but by the end of February, he was still calling it a “hoax.”
