Donald Trump doesn’t generally talk much about Covid and his response to the pandemic in 2020, but every once in a while, the former president will bring it up — in order to feel sorry for himself.
In August, for example, the Republican sat down with Fox News and boasted that he and his team did a “great job” responding to the public health disaster, before quickly adding, “[We] never got the credit for that.”
This came to mind watching Barack Obama headline a campaign rally in Arizona over the weekend.
Obama: When I was president, I had been talking to scientists for a while so during my last year in office, we put together a pandemic playbook for how to deal with the eventuality of a pandemic.. When Trump came in, we gave over this playbook and he threw it out. I want to be… pic.twitter.com/K7gnGmwD9U
— Acyn (@Acyn) October 20, 2024
“Listen, when I was president … I had been talking to scientists for a while,” the former Democratic president said. “And so, in my last year in office, we put together a playbook for how to deal with the eventuality of a pandemic — because scientists had been saying, with globalization and travel, etc., rising populations, that at some point there was going to be a pandemic. And so, I said to my team, I said, ‘We’ve got to have a plan,’ just like you do for hurricanes or tornadoes or natural disasters.
“So, we put together this whole playbook, and we ran, we practiced the playbook. We get all the agencies. This is how we’re going to respond. This is how to make sure that the public health systems in all the states are working. Here’s how we’re going to think about the schools. And when Donald Trump came in, we gave over this playbook to them. But the point is, he ignored it.”
After conceding the scope of the pandemic crisis, Obama added that Trump’s failures led to a death toll that could’ve been lower through more responsible governing.
“If somebody tells you that this doesn’t make a difference — having somebody competent, somebody who cares about you, who listens to ordinary people, who listens to people who are experts in these areas — if you hear somebody say, ‘It doesn’t matter,’ it does matter,” the former Democratic president concluded.
At first blush, this might not seem especially notable. Obama has directed plenty of criticisms at Trump over the years, so some might perceive this as little more than the latest installment in a larger pattern.








