Republican Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan on Thursday blasted President Donald Trump over his disastrous response to the coronavirus pandemic, calling it “inadequate” and accusing the administration of not providing testing resources, which forced his state to outsource COVID-19 tests from South Korea.
“Eventually, it was clear that waiting around for the president to run the nation’s response was hopeless; if we delayed any longer, we’d be condemning more of our citizens to suffering and death. So every governor went their own way,” Hogan wrote a Washington Post op-ed published Thursday.
Hogan, who is chairman of the National Governors Association, criticized Trump for downplaying the potential impact of the virus early on, and said the country missed the opportunity to prepare while other countries were experiencing outbreaks.
“So many nationwide actions could have been taken in those early days but weren’t,” Hogan wrote. “While other countries were racing ahead with well-coordinated testing regimes, the Trump administration bungled the effort.”
Hogan also accused the president of ignoring health experts and instead focusing on tweeting.
“Instead of listening to his own public health experts, the president was talking and tweeting like a man more concerned about boosting the stock market or his reelection plans,” Hogan said.
Hogan added in the op-ed to say that the governors were briefed by public health officials such as Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who told them the disease was dangerous and highly contagious.
“It was jarring, the huge contrast between the experts’ warnings and the president’s public dismissals,” Hogan said. “Weren’t these the people the White House was consulting about the virus? What made the briefing even more chilling was its clear, factual tone. It was a harrowing warning of an imminent national threat, and we took it seriously — at least most of us did. It was enough to convince almost all the governors that this epidemic was going to be worse than most people realized.”
The White House declined a request from comments from the Daily Boulder.
