Former President Barack Obama took aim at Donald Trump during an interview, telling former campaign manager David Plouffe that Trump wants all of the credit without taking any responsibility for his failures.
During a press briefing earlier this year as the coronavirus pandemic began surging, Trump openly stated that he “takes no responsibility at all” for his reckless and irresponsible response to the virus that has now resulted in 170,000 American deaths.
And Trump has continued to refuse to take responsibility all while predictably pushing for a vaccine before Election Day so he can take credit for it in a desperate effort to appeal to voters.
In fact, Trump has repeatedly claimed that a vaccine is right around the corner and that the virus will just magically go away.
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Obama is more realistic because he understands and respects science.
“That might relieve people’s anxieties, and that’s good, we should hope for that,” Obama said. “But that also can change the dynamic, particularly when you have a president who takes responsibility for nothing but takes credit for everything, and you don’t know how the economy might react to that. So there are a whole bunch of circumstances, most of which Joe Biden can’t control.”
Obama said that there is “no possibility of a vaccine for COVID being developed and distributed between now and the election, but it is possible that some of the trials that are being done result in us knowing before the election that a vaccine is on the way.”
Trump has frequently taken credit for the economy Obama built and recently got called out by a reporter for taking credit for a veteran’s choice law that Obama signed back in 2014.
But Obama is more concerned about the election, particularly Trump’s scheming to suppress the vote.
“Here’s what Joe Biden and Democrats can control: making sure that we vote,” Obama said. “So, if you ask me, the single thing that I am most concerned about between now and November, it is that we do everything humanly possible to ensure that everybody who wants a change in administration actually registers that change at the ballot box, whether that is in person or by mail-in voting.”
Speaking of mail-in voting, Obama also slammed Trump’s war against the Postal Service.
“What we’ve seen in a way that is unique to modern political history is a president who is explicit in trying to discourage people from voting,” he said. “What we’ve never seen before is a president say: ‘I’m going to try to actively kneecap the postal service to [discourage] voting and I will be explicit about the reason I’m doing it.’”
You can listen to the full interview on Spotify.
Featured image via Flickr/White House, under Creative Commons license 2.0
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