Former Vice President Al Gore rebuked President Trump for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, accusing him of acting “irresponsible, incompetent, and, in many ways, disgraceful.”
The 72-year-old former vice president issued his bleak review of Trump’s recent performance during a Monday night interview on MSNBC’s All In With Chris Hayes.
“Oh boy, Chris, it’s hard to know where to begin,” Gore began. “There’s no more important role for a president than to lead a nation through a crisis, and that means unifying people, and leading not only your political base, but reaching out to others with whom you disagreed, and Donald Trump has made this all about himself.”
He then brought up a report that Trump was repeatedly warned about the threat of the coronavirus in his daily intelligence briefing books in January and February. The briefing books, which conveyed warnings about the impending threat more than a dozen times, tracked the virus’s spread around the world, asserted China was covering up the disease’s transmissibility and death toll, and warned of political and economic consequences.
“He has engaged in a kind of a magical thinking. He’s pushed dangerous and potentially deadly snake oil-type remedies,” Gore said, referring to the president’s repeated promotion of two anti-malarial drugs that showed early signs of treating coronavirus symptoms despite a lack of evidence to support the claim. The comment also alluded to the president’s recent speculation about whether sunlight and disinfectants could be injected into the body to treat the virus.
“He’s lashed out at people who have been asking legitimate questions and who have pleaded with him to try to mobilize the federal government’s resources,” Gore continued. “And now luckily, there have been others that have stepped up, governors — Democratic and Republican governors in many cases — Dr. [Anthony] Fauci, other scientific and medical experts. This has brought a lot of good out in the American people. But this is a dangerous time for our country, Chris.”
The 2000 Democratic presidential nominee concluded, “We’ve got to get through this in spite of Donald Trump, but it has been an irresponsible, incompetent, and, in many ways, disgraceful performance.”
