Former House impeachment manager Adam Schiff said President Trump’s coronavirus response reminded him of the phone call with the Ukrainian president that formed the basis of the president’s impeachment.
“I don’t think we would have ever anticipated that his brand of narcissism and his brand of incompetence, sometimes his brand of malevolence, would be so fatal to the American people,” the California Democrat said on MSNBC.
“But probably, you know, the strongest echo of what we were talking about during the trial was when he was earlier talking about how he didn’t want to return the calls from governors, he didn’t want his vice president to return calls from governors, that weren’t saying nice things about him. That, really, weren’t saying things about him that he could then turn into campaign commercials, as indeed he has. That was such a profound and disturbing echo of what he tried to do with Ukraine.”
Schiff featured prominently in the attempt to remove Trump from office because of a phone call with the president of Ukraine. The Senate acquitted the president after he had been impeached by the House.
Schiff has been a consistent critic of Trump during the coronavirus outbreak and has said he’s investigating the methodology behind the decision to provide federal relief to American citizens during the pandemic.
“You had the president’s own people publicly talking about the danger and, even well after the virus was an established fact, that it was spreading and coming to the United States. You still had the president talking it down like it would be no worse than the flu,” Schiff told Mother Jones.
Almost 53,000 people in the U.S. have died from the coronavirus, and roughly 930,000 have been infected nationwide.
