Biden Slams Trump’s Pandemic Response: ‘It is the Presidential Responsibility to Lead, And He Didn’t Do That’
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden opened up his town hall on ABC Thursday night with a detailed discussion of how he would have handled the coronavirus pandemic differently than President Donald Trump, and he did not spare any punches in denouncing the performance of the Republican incumbent.
Biden slammed Trump for “saying things that weren’t true” regarding the pandemic, such as that it was “going to go away by Easter,” “it’s going to go away like a miracle,” and noted that even this late in the year, the president was continuing to make these claims, that the virus would go away on its own. Meanwhile, cases in the United States are currently trending upward.
Host George Stephanopoulos questioned Biden regarding an op-ed he had written back in January. “You warned of the seriousness of the pandemic, but there’s no record of you calling for social distancing, limited social gatherings, mandatory masks?”
“No, not back then,” Biden replied, “in January, February, there wasn’t. That came at the end of March and then I laid out a detailed plan relative to school openings in June and July and I talked about — but by that time, the science was becoming clearer and clearer of how this was spreading so rapidly. But the president kept denying that. If you notice, from March and, I stopped doing big meetings, I started wearing masks.”
Biden noted that some of Trump’s own key advisers, like Dr. Anthony Fauci, were recommending these kind of precautions.
Regarding what we should be doing now, Biden recommended a national standard instead of just “leaving it up” to governors to figure out, like Trump had, telling the governors they were “on their own.”
“It is the presidential responsibility to lead, and he didn’t do that,” said Biden. “He didn’t talk about what needed to be done because he kept worrying, in my view, about the stock market. He worried if he talked about how bad this could be unless we took these precautionary actions, then, in fact, the market would go down, and his barometer of success of the economy is the market.”
Watch the video above, via ABC.
