Trump Touts MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan In Attack On DeSantis’s Covid Record

Former president Donald Trump leaned on an unlikely ally to attack Florida Governor Ron DeSantis over his handling of the pandemic on Thursday: far-left MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan.

In a Truth Social post, Trump shared and favorably quoted a column written by Hasan for MSNBC:

Even now, as DeSantis touts his Covid prowess and his defiant response, one thing you won’t hear him talk about is how last summer, for three months straight, Florida had the highest number of Covid deaths of any state in the nation. In fact, it was the third straight summer in which that was the case.

Hasan argued in his column that each state should be judged by its performance after Covid vaccines became widely available to the public in May 2021, and that Florida has performed worse than its peers since then, the cause of which he attributes to DeSantis’s mismanagement.

He writes:

Here’s the thing. If you know that you have a large, vulnerable, elderly population, shouldn’t you take more precautions during the pandemic, to protect your own residents? You know, promote mask-wearing? Push for widespread vaccination? Encourage booster shots?

DeSantis, of course, loudly — and recklessly — flip-flopped on those public health priorities throughout the pandemic. That has cost the lives of thousands of Floridians, young and old.

“Now, some have compared DeSantis’ handling of the pandemic in Florida to Nero fiddling while Rome burned,” concludes Hasan. “But, in my view, that analogy isn’t quite right. DeSantis is perhaps worse than Nero, because at least he just fiddled. Nero didn’t help spread the fire.”

The pandemic has become a major point of contention between Trump and DeSantis, with the former claiming that former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D) did a better job than the latter and DeSantis knocking Trump for following the advice of Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Hasan has been similarly unsparing in his assessment of Trump’s approach to Covid, calling it “botched” and comparing him unfavorably to Marie Antoinette.