President Donald Trump’s incompetent self-obsession puts lives on the line. At his recent campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he claimed to the crowd that he had asked administration officials to slow down testing for the Coronavirus so that the overall number of confirmed cases could be kept low. White House officials subsequently claimed that Trump was just joking, but as recently as this Tuesday, when asked if he was kidding, Trump suggested that he was not. Hillary Clinton was among those to promptly condemn Trump for putting American lives on the line in service of his obsession with public image.
On Twitter this Tuesday, she shared:
‘Again, 120,000 Americans are dead from COVID-19 and the president ordered testing to be slowed down because big numbers would hurt him politically. There aren’t words for this level of betrayal.’
Again, 120,000 Americans are dead from COVID-19 and the president ordered testing to be slowed down because big numbers would hurt him politically.
There aren't words for this level of betrayal. https://t.co/v2fvnqdmcU
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) June 23, 2020
Trump’s insistence that he does not “kid” isn’t exactly ambiguous. No matter the clean-up operations that officials from his administration would like to carry on with, he seems to want observers to take his words seriously, no matter their level of dangerous ridiculousness. Coronavirus testing is, quite simply, imperative in the fight against the disease, because it allows public health authorities to track its spread and therefore — hopefully — be able to work to curtail the outbreak. The virus has already killed over 120,000 Americans, as Clinton notes — it’s not a trivial issue.
No matter the seriousness of the situation, and the fact that over 120,000 Americans have died and the country has been plunged into a serious crisis amidst the rush to pick up the slack of the president’s lax (at best) response, Trump still seems to want congratulations for his supposed job well done. This Tuesday morning, he even complained about the attention that the National Institutes of Health’s Dr. Anthony Fauci has gotten, as if responding to the pandemic is some kind of popularity contest.
….Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is with us in all ways, a very high 72% Approval Rating. So, if he is in charge along with V.P. etc., and with us doing all of these really good things, why doesn’t the Lamestream Media treat us as they should? Answer: Because they are Fake News!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 23, 2020
Check out Twitter’s response to Clinton:
