Jake Tapper Calls Out Ron Klain, Joe Biden for Failing to Deliver Campaign Promises on Covid Testing
CNN’s Jake Tapper hit President Joe Biden and Chief of Staff Ron Klain over broken campaign promises on the ease and availability of covid testing.
Tapper opened Wednesday’s The Lead with Covid-19 news, starting with the recent back and forth changes to CDC guidelines on isolation. The anchor then segued into the nationwide problems with the availability of testing under Biden after campaign promises to fix testing problems and frequent criticism of Donald Trump on the subject.
“Part of the problem with this latest confusing guidance by the CDC is that there are currently not enough tests out there,” said Tapper. “Even though President Biden and his now chief of staff Ron Klain spent much of the 2020 campaign talking about Trump’s failures to get testing to where it needed to be.”
Tapper then played a clip of Klain from 2020 confidently outlining how he and Biden were planning to save everyone from the pandemic.
“In the summer of 2020, Ron Klain described the Biden plan for tackling Covid as this,” he said to introduce the clip.
“The Biden plan starts with fixing Trump’s testing fiasco. He’d make sure all Americans have access to regular reliable and free testing,” Klain promised on behalf of the Biden campaign.
“All Americans, regular, reliable, free testing,” Tapper summarized. “It’s now 2022, and while Biden has invoked the Defense Production Act and testing is at 10 million a day as opposed to the 2020 number of under a million a day, it’s also true that Biden has fallen short of making sure, as Klain put it back then, that all Americans have access to regular, reliable and free testing.”
“That’s not where we are,” Tapper observed. “Not to the level that’s needed.”
In fact, it is not close to that. Each day there are more reports on local news stations detailing the hours-long lines, test kits being sold out the moment they’re back in stock, and Americans who need proof of negative tests for work or school are forced to wait and wait.
It’s something Klain and Biden both made a point about over and over again during the campaign. Tapper noted that the promise and the delivery don’t match up.
Watch the clip above, via CNN.
