Former President Barack Obama was in Las Vegas stumping for Harris-Walz when he shared a story about how he had given Felon Trump the playbook to follow in case of a pandemic, but Trump didn't heed his advice:
Listen, when I was president, I'll give you just one other example. And I want you to use this example when you're talking to folks who say it's not gonna make any difference. I had been talking to scientists for a while, and so in my last year in office, we put together a playbook for how to deal with the eventuality of a pandemic. Because scientists had been saying, with globalization and travel, et cetera, rising populations, that at some point there was gonna be a pandemic. And so, I said to my team, I said, we gotta have a plan, just like you do for hurricanes or tornadoes or natural disasters. So we put together this whole playbook. And we ran, we practiced the playbook. We'd get all the agencies. This is how we're gonna respond. This is how to make sure that the public health systems in all the states are working. Here's how we're gonna think about the schools. And when Donald Trump came in, we gave over this playbook to them. And- And- And- And- And- And- And- But the point is, he ignored it. And three years later, a pandemic hits. Now, I wanna really be fair on this, but I want everybody to pay attention. No matter who was president at the time, this was gonna be a problem. This was a generational pandemic. People were gonna get sick, people were gonna die. We didn't have a vaccine right away. Businesses were gonna have to shut down for a while. Travel was gonna be restricted. But if you look at a country like Canada, their per capita death rate was 40% lower than it was here. here in the United States. So just do the math. That's more than 400 ,000 people, people's grandmothers, people's fathers, people's moms who would have been alive if Donald Trump had just paid attention and tried to follow the plan that we gave him. It might have been somebody in your family that could have been impacted. So if somebody tells you that this doesn't make a difference, having somebody competent, somebody who cares about you, who listens to ordinary people, who listens to people who are experts in these areas, if you hear somebody say it doesn't matter, it does matter.
It doesn't take a stable genius to know that the reason Trump allowed all of those unnecessary and avoidable deaths was his own damn insecurity and narcissism. And unlike a fine wine or a good cheese, Trump is not getting better with age.
To be fair, I might be completely mistaken. But I'm not willing to bet my life - or anyone else's - on it.
