Donald Trump generally doesn’t talk much about Covid and his response to the pandemic in 2020, but every now and then the former president will bring it up — to feel sorry for himself.
In August, for example, the Republican spoke to Fox News and boasted that he and his team had done a “great job” responding to the public health disaster, before quickly adding, “[We] never got credit for that.
This came to mind when I saw Barack Obama headlining a campaign rally in Arizona this weekend.
Obama: When I was president, I had been talking to scientists for a while, so during my last year in office we put together a pandemic playbook on how to deal with the possibility of a pandemic. When Trump came in, we gave up on this playbook and he threw it away. I want to be… pic.twitter.com/K7gnGmwD9U
— Acyn (@Acyn) October 20, 2024
“Listen, when I was president… I had been talking to scientists for a while,” the former Democratic president said. “And so in my last year as president, we put together a playbook on how to deal with the possibility of a pandemic – because scientists had said, with globalization and travel, etc., rising population, that at some point when there was a pandemic. And so I told my team, “We need to have a plan,” just like you do for hurricanes, tornadoes, or natural disasters.
“So we put together this whole playbook, and we ran and practiced the playbook. We get all the agencies. This is how we are going to respond. This is how we can ensure public health systems work in all states. This is how we start thinking about schools. And when Donald Trump came in, we gave them this playbook. But the thing is, he ignored it.”
After acknowledging the magnitude of the pandemic crisis, Obama added that Trump’s failures led to a death toll that could have been lower if there had been a more responsible administration.
“When someone tells you that this doesn’t make a difference – when you have someone who is competent, someone who cares about you, who listens to ordinary people, who listens to people who are experts in these areas – when you hear someone say, ‘It doesn’t matter ‘It doesn’t matter’ do issue,” the former Democratic president concluded.
At first glance, this may not seem particularly remarkable. Obama has criticized Trump a lot over the years, so some may see this as little more than the latest part of a larger pattern.
But let’s not ignore this too quickly.
For all the recent talk about whether Americans are better off now than they were four years ago, the question itself suggests that much of the public does not remember how painful and tragically awful conditions were in the United States in 2020.
Some of that suffering can and should be linked to the then US president who failed in almost every way imaginable: ignoring experts, pursuing quacks, politicizing federal agencies, needlessly lying, downplaying the importance of testing, sidelining anyone who told them the truth. he didn’t want to hear it, promoting conspiracy theories, pitting states against each other, undermining public confidence in science, offering overly rosy projections based on nothing but unrealistic wishes, and at one point even from the White House briefing stage House suggest there may be value in injecting disinfectants into humans.
And did I mention that Trump also ignored the pandemic playbook left behind by his predecessor? Because Obama was right: so did the incompetent Republican.
I’m aware that memories in politics can be short, but since Trump occasionally whines about not getting “credit” for the “great job” he’s done in response to the pandemic, it’s smart from his Democratic predecessor to remind Americans about what really happened.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
