Andy Slavitt made the argument that the coronavirus pandemic would’ve happened regardless of Donald Trump, but the former president’s administration committed “three deadly sins” that made the health crisis worse.
Slavitt, who previously advised President Joe Biden on the pandemic, joined CBS’s John Dickerson on Face The Nation to promote his new book on the U.S. coronavirus response. As Slavitt spoke about the cultural logistics America had to deal with during the pandemic, he said “we would have had a pandemic without the Trump administration. But there were three, I think, deadly sins that the Trump administration made that played out.”
“The first was his power that he believed to deny the very existence of the virus or the potency of it, and to get his followers to go along with it,” Slavitt said. “If he simply hadn’t done that and simply said, ‘hey, we’ve got a problem,’ we would have been in a very different situation.”
Slavitt said Trump’s second flaw was “his quashing of dissent,” referring to the Trump administration’s insistence that they had the pandemic under control. Meanwhile, “anyone who disagreed with the narrative the president wanted was squashed.”
Slavitt attributed the third “sin” to Trump’s continued attempt to be a populist during the crisis.
Being a populist during a pandemic is really not a great
combination because you’re going to have to make some tough decisions. You’re going to have to make people unhappy. And I think Trump saw in his base a stirring of anti-mask characterizations and other things, and he played into those things because I think he felt like a different route. And I think those three things were things that, you know, cost us a lot of lives.
Watch above, via CBS.