Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden unleashed a stinging indictment of President Donald Trump’s handling the Covid-19 pandemic during his Democratic National Convention acceptance speech: “He’s failed to protect America. And, my fellow Americans, that is unforgivable.”
Biden spent a large chunk of his speech focusing on the singular issue that has inflicted multiple, unprecedented crises upon the country. His judgment of Trump’s performance was meticulous and unsparing.
“As president the first step I will take will be to get control of the virus that has ruined so many lives because I understand something this president hasn’t from the beginning: We will never get our economy back on track, we will never get our kids safely back in schools, we’ll never have our lives back until we deal with this virus,” Biden said. “The tragedy of where we are today is it didn’t have to be this bad. Just look around. It’s not this bad in Canada or Europe or Japan or almost anywhere else in the world. And the president keeps telling us the virus is going to disappear. He keeps waiting for a miracle. Well, I have news for him. No miracle is coming.”
Biden then laid out the facts that the nation leads the world in confirmed Covid-19 cases and deaths — and connected Trump mismanagement of the outbreak to the resulting economic catastrophe gripping the country.
“Our economy is in tatters with Black, Latino, Asian-American, Native American communities bearing the brunt of it,” he pointed out. “And after all this time the president still does not have a plan. Well, I do. If I’m your president on day one, we’ll implement the national strategy I’ve been laying out since March. We’ll develop and deploy rapid tests with the results available immediately. We’ll make the medical supplies and protective equipment that our country needs. We’ll make them here in America so we will never again be at the mercy of China or other foreign countries in order to protect our own people. We’ll make sure our schools have the resources they need to be open, safe and effective.”
Biden also emphasized that his administration will put science before politics when dealing with the pandemic, and unabashedly called for individual Americans to take a shared role in stopping the spread of the virus.
“We’ll have a national mandate to wear a mask, not as a burden but as a patriotic duty to protect one another,” Biden said. “In short, we’ll do what we should have done from the very beginning. Our current president’s failed in his most basic duty to the nation. He’s failed to protect us. He’s failed to protect America. And, my fellow
Watch the video above, via MSNBC.