Obama: Trump is a ‘chaotic disaster’

FORMER US president Barack Obama has launched a scathing attack on Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, calling it an “absolute chaotic disaster.”

In a leaked web call on Friday night with former members of his administration, Obama urges former staffers to join him in rallying behind Joe Biden as he prepares to take on Trump in the November presidential election.

The audio was first obtained by Yahoo News.

The United States by far leads the world in the number of coronavirus infections, more than 1.3 million, and deaths, with nearly 79,000. Trump has been criticized as essentially abdicating any leadership role in guiding the country through one of its worst crises in a century, leaving states on their own to grapple with the pandemic and even bid against each other to obtain critical medical equipment on the open market or abroad.

With an eye to reelection, the president has also been blasted as putting his own political interests before human life by aggressively pushing states to reopen their devastated economies without a clear blueprint for how to do it safely.

“What we’re fighting against is these long-term trends in which being selfish, being tribal, being divided, and seeing others as an enemy — that has become a stronger impulse in American life,” Obama said.

“It’s part of the reason why the response to this global crisis has been so anemic and spotty.

“It would have been bad even with the best of governments. It has been an absolute chaotic disaster when that mindset — of ‘what’s in it for me’ and ‘to heck with everybody else’ — when that mindset is operationalized in our government.”

(AFP)