Obama lashes out at President Trump in phone call
Former President Barack Obama harshly criticised President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic as an “absolute chaotic disaster” during a conversation with ex-members of his administration, according to a recording obtained by Yahoo News.
More than 78,400 people with Covid-19 have died in the United States and more than 1.3 million people have tested positive, according to the latest estimates from the Centre for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.
Obama’s comments came during a call with 3000 members of the Obama Alumni Association, people who served in his administration. Obama urged his supporters to back his former vice-president, Joe Biden, who is trying to unseat Trump in the November 3 election.
“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. And by the way, we’re seeing that internationally as well. It’s part of the reason the response to this global crisis has been so anemic and spotty,” Obama said, according to Yahoo News. “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 operationalised in our government,” he said.
Trump has consistently defended and boasted of his response to the virus, saying that travel restrictions from China and Europe as well as social distancing guidelines have prevented far greater damage.
“I think we saved millions of lives,” he said last week.
Trump has criticised the Obama administration in relation to his own administration’s response to the outbreak. Yet Trump’s contention that his administration inherited “a broken system and a broken test” from Obama’s is false; the novel coronavirus did not exist until late last year.