Rep. Adam Schiff suggested President Trump had displayed an inability to lead the country during a pandemic and his alleged failure was costing American lives.
“Here one of the parties has become a cult to the president’s personality, and in the wake of these bloodlettings, bloodletting of inspector generals, the response from the GOP in Congress has been nothing but silence,” Schiff said Tuesday night on MSNBC. “And silence in the face of this kind of incompetent response is really deadly, and the country needs to demand more of their representatives.”
Trump this week ousted the watchdog overseeing the federal government’s rollout of the $2 trillion in congressionally approved aid for people and businesses negatively affected by the coronavirus.
A Department of Health inspector general also found “severe” deficiencies in the American healthcare system as it struggles to keep up with the spread of the virus.
Schiff pointed to examples such as these as the justification for Democrats to push for oversight.
“This is to save the jobs of people throughout the country, not to be used as a slush fund for President Trump or the first family,” Schiff said. “And so that oversight is critical. It’s critical to keeping people’s jobs. But the rest of the oversight is critical to making sure that the health care system continues to function as it should.”
Trump has defended himself from attacks at the hands of Democrats by pointing to the federal response to the H1N1 virus under former President Barack Obama and claiming he saved thousands of lives when he banned travel to the United States from China by foreign nationals.
Susan Rice, a former national security adviser to Obama, made an almost identical claim to Schiff’s earlier this week.
“He’s been profoundly dishonest about the nature of the threat to the American people by downplaying it, by dismissing it, by comparing it to the flu. … He has misled the American people to such an extent that lives have been lost in the process,” Rice said.
Nearly 400,000 cases of the coronavirus have been reported in the U.S., and more than 10,000 people have died as of Wednesday.
