President Donald Trump is obsessed with being better than his predecessor Barack Obama, so he’s going to lose his sh*t after he hears what former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt had to say about Obama on MSNBC.
The coronavirus death toll now stands at more than 82,000 and the number of Americans infected is nearing 1.4 million. The economy is in shambles and the unemployment rate is poised to soar past 20 percent in the coming weeks. But the effects of the pandemic could have been prevented or at least mitigated had Trump acted sooner and if he had used the pandemic playbook the Obama administration left for future administrations to employ.
That being said, Schmidt did not hold back when he openly stated that this disaster would not have happened if Obama had been president instead of Trump.
“If Barack Obama was the president of the United States, this would not have happened,” Schmidt said. “We would have had competent professional people. We would have done what we needed to do early. What would have happened is what happened during the Ebola crisis. We would have had someone like Ron Klain in charge of it, not the confederacy of dunces that we see running around the West Wing.”
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Here’s the video:
Thanks for having me @AriMelber on @Msnbc . https://t.co/nRlkigvRZm
— Steve Schmidt (@SteveSchmidtSES) May 11, 2020
He’s not wrong. Obama would have chosen the best people to handle the job. Instead, we have the likes of Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, and the MyPillow guy — because Trump is incapable of doing what’s best for the country and would rather appoint unqualified cronies even when a crisis requires expertise.
Obama handled the Ebola crisis with ease because he picked Ron Klain and built a pandemic response team to make sure the various departments worked together for one common purpose. Obama even got our country through the H1N1 epidemic because he reacted quickly. Trump not only failed to react swiftly, but he also disbanded the pandemic response team and rejected the simulation the Obama transition team showed him to get his own team prepared for a future pandemic.
Had Obama been in charge, all of this would still have been in place and tens of thousands of Americans who have died may still be alive today, and our economy would not have come to a grinding halt.
Schmidt is a member of the Lincoln Project, which has gotten under Trump’s skin in recent weeks for running a series of devastating ads against him. It’s safe to say that Trump’s not going to like what Schmidt said here either. After all, the truth hurts.
Featured image via screen capture
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