Former President Barack Obama slammed the Trump administration for its coronavirus response, saying the White House is probably using the pandemic playbook he left “to prop up a wobbly table.”
“We literally left this White House a pandemic playbook that would have shown them how to respond before the virus reached our shores. They probably used it to, I don’t know, prop up a wobbly table somewhere,” the former president said Wednesday at a campaign event in Philadelphia for Joe Biden.
“We don’t know where that playbook went. Eight months into this pandemic, cases are rising again across this country. Donald Trump isn’t suddenly going to protect all of us. He can’t even take the basic steps to protect himself. Just last night, he complained up in Erie that the pandemic made him go back to work. I’m quoting him. He was upset that the pandemic’s made him go back to work. If he’d actually been working the whole time, it never would’ve gotten this bad,” he continued.
President Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly criticized the Obama administration for its H1N1 response in 2009.
“I did more in 47 months than he did in 47 years,” Trump said earlier this month. “He had his chance with H1N1 Swine flu, and it was one of the great disasters. He didn’t know what he was doing, but I know what I’m doing.”
“[The Obama administration’s] response to H1N1 Swine Flu was a full-scale disaster, with thousands dying, and nothing meaningful done to fix the testing problem, until now. The changes have been made, and testing will soon happen on a very large scale basis. All Red Tape has been cut, ready to go!” Trump said on Twitter earlier this year.
Obama returned to the campaign trail in the battleground state to rally support for Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris while offering blistering attacks on Trump.
“He hasn’t shown any interest in doing the work or helping anybody but himself and his friends,” Obama said. “This is not a reality show. This is reality, and the rest of us have had to live with the consequences of him proving himself incapable of taking the job seriously.”
Trump dismissed Obama’s campaigning while he held a rally in North Carolina on Wednesday evening.
“Somebody said, ‘Sir, maybe this isn’t good. President Obama’s campaigning for Sleepy Joe Biden.’ I said, ‘That’s good news or bad news? Tell me, are you saying it’s good, or it’s bad?’ ‘Well, I guess it’s bad.’ No, it’s good,” Trump said at the rally. “There is nobody that campaigned harder for ‘Crooked’ Hillary Clinton than Obama. He was all over the place.”
