Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus has been criticized by experts and people around the country. His failure to take the pandemic seriously when he was first warned has led to over 40,000 people dying in the United States.
But according to Trump, his failures should be blamed on former President Barack Obama for not developing a proper test for a disease that didn’t even exist while he was in office.
“I started with an obsolete, broken system from a previous administration,” Trump said during his Saturday press briefing, adding: “Unfortunately, some partisan voices are attempting to politicize the issue of testing, which they shouldn’t be doing, because I inherited broken junk. Just as they did with ventilators where we had virtually none, and the hospitals were empty.”
According to Vox’s Aaron Rupar, Trump’s explanation is completely “nonsensical.”
“The CDC couldn’t have bad tests left over from the Obama administration, because the coronavirus test didn’t exist until this year,” Rupar writes. “And the stockpile was far from empty — its problem was that it was poorly maintained, an issue that rests on the Trump administration’s shoulders.”
"We started off with a broken system. We inherited a broken, terrible system. And I always say it — our cupboards were bare. We had very little in our stockpile": Trump tries to blame Obama, who left office in 2017, for a virus that reached the US in 2020 pic.twitter.com/YwMSPkjmw8
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 18, 2020
