In his first address to the nation with upgraded production value, Joe Biden hit President Trump for comparing himself to a wartime president in orchestrating a national response to the coronavirus pandemic.
“Trump keeps saying that he’s — that he’s a ‘wartime president.’ Well, start to act like one,” the former vice president and presumptive Democratic nominee said in a livestream from his Wilmington, Delaware, home on Monday.
Trump said last week that he views his position as being like a wartime president waging a “war” against the respiratory virus.
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“To paraphrase a frustrated President Lincoln, writing into an inactive Gen. McClellan during the Civil War: ‘If you don’t want to use the army, may I borrow it?'” Biden said. “We need to get in motion — get in motion today what we should have set in motion weeks ago.”
Biden commended Trump for activating the National Guard to respond to the crisis and called on him to use the Defense Production Act to increase radically “the supply of critical goods needed to treat patients and protect our healthcare workers.” He criticized congressional Republicans for creating a relief package that he said would be a “$500 billion slush fund for corporations.”
“Donald Trump is not to blame for the coronavirus. But he does bear responsibility for our response. And I, along with every American, hope he steps up and starts to get this right,” Biden said.
[Read more: Biden pushes student debt cancellation to counter coronavirus economic slowdown]
