Foreign

COVID-19: Barack Obama attacks President Trump’s govt

Published

5 years ago

May 10, 2020

Former President, Barack Obama, has attacked President Donald Trump, describing his handling of the coronavirus pandemic as an “absolute chaotic disaster.”

The former President launched the attack in a leaked web call on Friday night with former members of his administration.

Yahoo News reports that Obama also urged his former staffers to join him in rallying support for Joe Biden in the November presidential election.

The US is ahead of the rest of the world with a wide margin in the number of confirmed COVID-19 infections, at nearly 1.3 million, and more than 77,000 deaths.

Trump has been criticized for first, downplaying the threat posed by coronavirus, squandering precious time in February as the pathogen spread in America.

The president has also been knocked for allegedly putting his own political interests before the lives of Americans as the election draws closer, by pushing states to reopen their devastated economies without a clear blueprint for how to do it safely.

“What we’re fighting against is these long-term trends in which being selfish, being tribal, being divided, and seeing others as an enemy — that has become a stronger impulse in American life,” Obama told his former staffers.

“It’s part of the reason why the response to this global crisis has been so anemic and spotty,” Obama said.

“It would have been bad even with the best of governments. It has been an absolute chaotic disaster when that mindset — of ‘what’s in it for me’ and ‘to heck with everybody else’ — when that mindset is operationalized in our government,” he said.