On AM Joy, Susan Rice eviscerated all of the blame Trump is trying to lay on the Obama administration by pointing out facts about how Trump dismantled all of the parts President Obama put in place to deal with a pandemic, and wow was she on fire.
First, she took care of Jared Kushner's "Mission Accomplished" declaration earlier this week.
And she's off and running:
How one could possibly declare that a success of any sort, mission accomplished is bewildering and it is offensive because so many Americans are suffering. We're suffering loss of life, loss of loved ones, and the degree of our suffering in human terms and economic terms is, frankly, far greater than it needed to be because of this administration's incompetence, the president's denials and dishonest statements and their refusal to act on the information they had beginning in early and mid-January, when we learned this was a major problem in China. Any person with knowledge and experience of pandemics knows this was going to come to us in a major way.
Having disposed of Kushner, she then turned to this group of miscreant incompetents in the White House, and specifically, Donald Trump's claim that there was some faulty tests that were left behind by the Obama administration.
Rice was in no mood to be even a little bit nice. It is delicious:
But the broader narrative that somehow the Obama administration left this new administration unprepared is ridiculous. First of all, this is 3 1/2 years into the Trump administration. They own whatever the situation is.
Secondly, we understood very clearly the real likelihood of a pandemic. President Obama spoke to it publicly in December 2014 as we were wrestling with the Ebola epidemic. I set up an office at the White House, solely for the purpose of tracking global health events and possible pandemics and responding to them. We left them a 69-page playbook which I called "pandemics for dummies" which was designed to enable an administration to walk through a set of issues and questions and begin to prepare a response.
They dismantled the office, discarded the playbook. They disregarded the exercise we prepared for them to enable them to work through these kinds of issues in the transition, and they never prioritized pandemics as the catastrophic threat we all knew it could be.
And that, more importantly, Joy, they wasted the months of January and February in terms of gearing up our response. That's the time when we should have been surging the acquisition and procurement of PPE and ventilators and tests and all of the things that we now know, that all Americans now know are so badly needed. We knew that to be the case. We left a whole and complete national strategic stockpile.
For the Trump administration to blame the Obama administration or blame anybody else is purely an effort to cover up and distract from their own extraordinary failings.
Thank you, Susan Rice for being forceful and straightforward about what we all know to be true. Donald Trump and his gang OWN the disaster this pandemic has brought to our country through their own incompetence and desire to undo everything President Obama did because of Trump's petty, ego-driven needs.
In a segment not included in the clip above, Joy asked Rice if she was being vetted for Vice President. She demurred. I've gotta say, based on what I've seen here and elsewhere, she could definitely be a serious candidate for the nomination. After all, she and Biden are definitely on the same page:
We left a playbook. He ignored it.
We created an office to prepare for pandemics. He gutted it.
We had CDC officials in China to detect and contain outbreaks. He pulled them out.
Trump can try and shift blame all he wants, but the fact is his actions left us unprepared. https://t.co/NdsINZ307m— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) May 2, 2020
