Bolton Shatters Trump Claim He Was Proactive on Halting Virus Spread From China: He Didn’t Care ‘When It Mattered’
Former White House national security adviser John Bolton torpedoed President Donald Trump’s claim that he was proactive in his efforts to stop the coronavirus before it became an American health crisis.
Bolton joined Fox News’ Dana Perino on Thursday for an interview that gravitated around the deeply unflattering revelations he shared about Trump in his new memoir: The Room Where It Happened. As part of the conversation, Perino had Bolton react to a New York Times poll indicating more voters think Trump can do better than Joe Biden at dealing with China.
“I am not sure either one of them would do a very good job,” Bolton answered. “If the president is re-elected, freed from the pressure of the re-election campaign, I think the harsh rhetoric against China — some of the things he’s done in recent months — could disappear again and he would be right back there with his buddy Xi Jinping.”
Bolton was referring to his book’s claim that Trump’s the prime directive on diplomacy with China was to improve his own re-election chances. As such, Perino asked Bolton if he maintains that view despite the president’s tough talk against China after the coronavirus pandemic reached full swing.
Bolton’s answer:
Well, he wasn’t upset about it enough when it mattered in early January, when the experts in the government, the staffers in the NSC, the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health were raising red flags. President Trump didn’t want to hear a bad word about Xi Jinping. He didn’t want to hear how China was covering up the severity of the disease in China. He didn’t want to hear how it might affect the trade negotiations with China. Especially, what he didn’t want to hear was the risk of a serious pandemic affecting our economy very negatively and, thus, undermining his election campaign. He closed his ears to the reality and we lost a lot of time where significant steps could have been taken that would’ve lessened the impact of the disease.
In the first three months of the year, Trump repeatedly dismissed fears of the coronavirus before claiming he “always” took it seriously. The president has continued to make false or dismissive statements about the disease since then, even while the economy remains in a crater and the U.S. death toll exceeded 120,000. Further, he has repeatedly boasted that the travel ban he imposed on China saved “hundreds of thousands” of lives. Roughly 40 other nations restricted travel from China before the U.S. did so on Feb. 2.
Watch above, via Fox News.
