Donald Trump’s obsessively jealous displays targeting former President Barack Obama have been ongoing for years. Still, during the novel coronavirus pandemic, the current occupant of the White House has been blaming his predecessor for his own blundering response to the raging COVID-19 outbreak. “The last administration left us nothing,” Trump has said repeatedly.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch took no prisoners in its response to Trump’s claim while quoting the president saying, “We inherited a broken, terrible system” and “Our cupboards were bare. We had very little in our stockpile.”
Trump is, after all, the “take no responsibility” president.
The paper did a fact-check after researching through the year before Obama left office to the present. “Trump can lie, [but] the numbers cannot,” the editorial piece writes. “Obama left office with an unblemished record of building up the nation’s pandemic preparedness. Trump systematically sought to dismantle it.”
Perhaps because of his experience with the 2015 Ebola outbreak, Obama sought to leave his successor fully prepared to confront future pandemics. He asked in his fiscal 2017 budget request to boost federal isolation and quarantine funding by $15 million, to $46.6 million. Congress approved $31.6 million. In Trump’s three years in office, he has not requested a dime more in funding.”
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Oh, that could be why President Ranty has been raging on Twitter this morning to lash out at Joe Biden over the former vice-president’s “handling of the H1N1 Swine Flu” that President IMAX called “a complete and total disaster.” Trump had the resources, but the president failed to act in order to prepare for a future pandemic.
Obama asked to nearly double his own $40 million outlay for epidemiology and laboratory capacity. Congress balked, but Obama left Trump with that $40 million as a starting point. What did Trump do? In his 2020 budget, he asked Congress to cut that number to: Zero. Zilch. Nothing.”
The paper also notes that if Trump was so concerned with being left with a bare cupboard, then “why did he ask Congress to cut the 2020 pandemic preparedness budget by $102.9 million?”
The phrase “pandemic preparedness” appears only one time in Trump’s 2020 budget, and that’s in stark contrast to Obama’s budget. And the newspaper said a chart from the Trump administration with the budget shows that by Obama’s final year in office, the country’s public health emergency preparedness was at least 98% on every key measure.
“That’s by the Trump administration’s own assessment,” the Post-Dispatch wrote. “If the cupboard was bare, it’s because Trump swept it clean.” And now, here we are with nearly one hundred thousand US deaths from the coronavirus pandemic. More than thirty-eight million Americans are suddenly unemployed, and Trump was golfing all weekend.
Featured image via Political Tribune gallery
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