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.
“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.
But let’s not be too quick to rush past this.
For all the recent talk about whether Americans are better off now than they were four years ago, the question itself suggests too much of the public doesn’t remember just how painfully and tragically awful conditions were in the United States in 2020.
Some of that suffering can and should be connected to the then-American president who failed in practically every way he could: ignoring experts, pursuing quack cures, politicizing federal agencies, lying unnecessarily, downplaying the importance of testing, sidelining anyone who told them truths he didn’t want to hear, promoting conspiracy theories, pitting states against one another, undermining public confidence in science, offering overly rosy projections based on nothing but unrealistic wishes, and at one point, even suggesting from the White House briefing podium that there might be value in injecting disinfectants into human beings.
And did I mention that Trump also ignored the pandemic playbook left by his predecessor? Because Obama was right: The incompetent Republican did that, too.
I’m mindful of the fact that memories can be short in politics, but as Trump occasionally whines that he doesn’t get “credit” for the “great job” he did responding to the pandemic, it’s smart of his Democratic predecessor to remind Americans about what actually happened.