Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House joined Jake Tapper on CNN's State of the Union this morning and did not mince words on how Trump handled the pandemic.
The Speaker lambasted Donald Trump's Nero-like response to the coronavirus and called his actions "deadly" to the American people.
"Trump is considering relaxing federal guidelines for coronavirus for some of the less affected parts of the country. do you think he should?" Jake Tapper asked.
"The president, his denial at the beginning, was deadly. His delaying of getting equipment to where it -- his continued delay in getting equipment to where it's needed is deadly," Pelosi replied.
She said we must continue to get all the medical equipment we need as fast as we can. Pelosi remarked that she did not know what the scientists were and weren't telling Trump, what did he know or didn't know and when.
"But as the president fiddles, people are dying," she said.
That captures his reactions pretty nicely. However, I would not characterize Trump's initial reaction as denial, but one of self-preservation. He told us that he wanted to keep the numbers of people infected down as much as possible.
This means he was thoroughly brought in on the severity of this virus and chose to downplay it, have his surrogates like Larry Kudlow tell us the virus was contained and downplay the federal government's response to it because that would've alerted voters and hurt his chances of reelection.
"Speaker Pelosi, when you say the president's denial was deadly, he obviously downplayed the risks of coronavirus for several weeks and it wasn't until I think about two weeks ago that he started acknowledging the gravity of the crisis," Tapper noted. "Are you saying his downplaying ultimately cost American lives?"
"Yes, I am," Pelosi replied.
She continued, "The other day, when he was signing the bill, he said, just think, 20 days ago everything was great. No, everything wasn't great. We had nearly 500 cases and 17 deaths already and in that 20 days, because we weren't prepared, we now have 2,000 deaths and 100,000 cases."
"So again, we really want to work in a unifying way to get the job done here. But we cannot continue to allow him to continue to make these underestimates of what is actually happening here. This is such a tragedy and we don't even know the magnitude of it because we do not have the adequate testing," Pelosi stated.
We will probably never know the extent to which Americans have been endangered, thanks to Trump's ineffective approach to testing. Putin couldn't have thought of a better way to do harm to our country.
