Trump Reinvents Pandemic Response Wheel After Scrapping Team Obama Left Him
WASHINGTON — Six years after ridiculing predecessor Barack Obama’s handling of a major health crisis and two years after dismantling the pandemic response team Obama left behind, President Donald Trump is now reinventing the infectious disease wheel.
“Because of all I’ve done, the risk to the American people remains very low,” he said in a Wednesday evening White House news conference about the coronavirus crisis he has spent weeks downplaying. “We’ve had tremendous success beyond what people would have thought.”
He also put Vice President Mike Pence in charge of the government’s coronavirus response, while denying Pence would serve as “czar” – a title he had mocked when Obama had used in his response to the Ebola outbreak in 2014.
“Mike is not a czar. He’s vice president,” Trump said.
In 2014, Trump relentlessly attacked Obama’s handling of the Ebola epidemic in Africa, savaging him in nearly 100 Twitter posts over a three-month period.
“The United States must immediately institute strong travel restrictions or Ebola will be all over the United States-a plague like no other!” Trump wrote on Sept. 30, 2014.
“Obama just appointed an Ebola Czar with zero experience in the medical area and zero experience in infectious disease control. A TOTAL JOKE!” he wrote two weeks later. (Wednesday, Trump defended his choice of Pence, who is also not a doctor or scientist, because he had been a governor.)
Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing radio host Trump honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom earlier this month, claimed in 2014 that Obama administration officials “have this attitude, ‘Well, if they have it in Africa, by God, we deserve to get it, because they’re in Africa because of us and because of slavery.’”
Ronald Klain, a veteran of both the Bill Clinton and Obama White Houses, was that Ebola “czar,” tasked with coordinating the responses from the various executive branch agencies dealing with the...
