Joe Biden took to the screen to lambaste Trump’s handling of the coronavirus once again, saying the president has been distracted by “late-night rantings and tweets” instead of the health of the public.
“Today, I am releasing a plan with the steps Donald Trump should undertake immediately,” the former vice president said Tuesday in Wilmington, Delaware. “It builds on the roadmap I released back in March that would have saved lives if it had been adopted. It is a plan to save lives in the months ahead.”
The presumptive 2020 Democratic nominee’s campaign has been virtually limited to just two states: Delaware and Pennsylvania. But that has not stopped him from occasionally venturing outside of his Wilmington home to meetings with voters, hold virtual fundraising events, and routinely attack the president’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
In his remarks at a high school in Wilmington, Biden offered an alternative vision for the country as it faces a new uptick in infections just as states began easing lockdown measures.
“It’s not about you, Mr. President — it’s about the health and well-being of the American public. The American people didn’t make enormous sacrifices over the past four months so you could waste your time with late-night rantings and tweets,” he said. “They didn’t make these sacrifices so you could ignore the science and turn responsible steps like wearing a mask into a political statement.”
Biden also took a victory lap of sorts, comparing his statements about China misleading the international community on how it was handling the coronavirus outbreak. He attacked Trump for his praise of Chinese President Xi Jinping and for championing the opening of businesses, even as states are dealing with thousands of new coronavirus cases per day.
[Read more: Biden targets Trump’s mental state: ‘Doesn’t seem cognitively aware’]
“Now, it’s almost July, and it seems our wartime president has surrendered, waved the white flag, and abandoned the battlefield,” Biden said.
He also sounded the alarm about the rising cases, urging the administration to adopt his plan of expanding testing and healthcare access to avoid plunging into a crisis New York City faced just months ago.
“Despite the administration’s propaganda that their response should be a cause for celebration, despite President Trump’s request that we should slow down testing because he thinks that makes him look bad, the COVID-19 is still here,” Biden said.
“Fix the shortage of PPE before you tee off on another round of golf,” he said, adding that “what we’ve been doing has not been working. … You called yourself a cheerleader. We don’t need a cheerleader, Mr. President. We need a president, Mr. President.”
Biden’s remarks come in the wake of warnings from federal health officials that the United States is on the brink of seeing hundreds of thousands of people sick in the upcoming weeks.
“We’re going to continue to be in a lot of trouble. And there’s going to be a lot of hurt if that does not stop and get our act together,” top government infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci said during a Senate committee hearing. “We are now having 40-plus thousand new cases a day, and I would not be surprised if we go up to 100,000 [cases] a day.”
The U.S. has confirmed more than 2.6 million cases and at least 129,500 deaths, with the rate of increase in cases rising sharply in states such as Texas, Florida, California, and Texas.
