Donald Trump likes to blame his lack of initiative against the coronavirus on the previous administration. In fact, he likes to blame a lot of his failures on former President Barack Obama.
Trump tried to do that on Thursday when he claimed that the Obama administration had not created a test for a virus that did not exist when he was president.
“The last administration left us with nothing!” Trump ranted. “We started off with bad, broken tests and obsolete tests!”
That’s when CNN’s Jim Acosta confronted him by asking how Obama could have possibly been expected to deliver a test for a disease that had never been seen in humans until nearly three years after he left office.
“It’s a new virus, so how could the tests be broken?” he asked.
Instead of giving a straight answer, Trump reinstated his remarks.
“Jim, we had broken tests!” Trump insisted. “We had tests that were obsolete, we had tests that didn’t take care of people!”
Trump then pivoted to Obama’s handling of the H1N1 swine flu, which killed five times fewer Americans in the span of one year than the novel coronavirus has killed over just six weeks.
Take a look at Trump’s rant in the video clip below:
.@Acosta: You say you had "broken tests" from Obama — the coronavirus is a new virus, so how could the tests be broken?
TRUMP: "We have broken tests. We had tests that were obsolete. We had tests that didn't take care of people." (None of this makes sense.) pic.twitter.com/r7oobJNFU2
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 30, 2020
