David Gergen Blasts Trump’s Reckless Behavior, Public Dismissal of Covid: ‘We’re in the Grips of a Madman’

Longtime presidential advisor David Gergen, who has worked in four different White Houses, pulled no punches in describing President Donald Trump’s reckless behavior flouting CDC guidelines and dismissing the Covid virus currently infecting him, saying that the country is now “in the grips of a madman.”

Trump, who had reportedly been agitating to be discharged from Walter Reed Medical Center on Sunday, announced via Twitter on Monday that he would be returning to the White House that evening. In his tweet, he also irresponsibly advised the public “don’t be afraid of Covid” of a pandemic that has claimed 210,000 American lives so far and then boasted he hadn’t felt as good in two decades. Trump is currently being treating with a unique therapeutic drug cocktail that includes powerful steroids.

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer keying off Trump’s tweet, asked Gergen: “Have you ever seen a president behave as this president is behaving right now saying what he’s saying, doing what he’s doing? So many clearly can see as totally irresponsible.”

“Never,” Gergen said, point blank. “And I hope we never do again. I wake up some days, Wolf, practically feeling like we’re in the grips of a madman and it’s going to take a while to get out, get back to normal. I think we should all be pleased the president has made this

progress and is going home but to Abby [Phillip]’s point, we should be alarmed by the lessons the president is taking with him. the very idea that people should not be afraid of Covid. He’s doubling down on the biggest mistake of his presidency, which was to taken Covid in a cavalier fashion to begin with, to downplay it, to sugarcoat it and now he’s sending this same signal out saying they don’t have to worry about it.”

“If you’re not scared of it, I think he’s going to get a lot of people killed as a result. Starting with the White House itself,” Gergen added, still outraged. “His team, the Trump team, is now saying ‘Well, he’s come through Covid. He’s proved he’s macho, he’s a man and he understands it. He gets it.’ I’m afraid he does not get it and they think they’ve got some superior argument against Joe Biden. How many around Trump right now in his inner circle have been struck down by this disease recently? At least a dozen people have gone down. How many people in Joe Biden’s circle have been struck by this disease recently? The best I can tell, zero. One approach works, and the other one doesn’t. We ought to be very clear about that.”

The gravity of Gergen’s withering criticism was reinforce minutes later after a commercial break, when Bob Woodward, the venerable Washington Post reporter and author of the damning, inside-the-White-House book, Rage, circled back to the longtime Washington insider’s indictment of Trump.

“The starting point here is listening to David Gergen say we may be ‘in the grips of a madman,'” Woodward said to Blitzer, before notably referencing one of Gergen’s most infamous presidential bosses. “I’ve known David Gergen for almost 50 years when he worked in the Nixon White House. I’ve never heard him say something that extreme.”

Watch the videos above, via CNN.