OBAMA INSISTS BETTER POLICY VS COVID-19 NEEDED

Former President Barack Obama has asked the Trump administration to shape up and use all the tools in the shed to battle the deadly COVID-19 pandemic that has killed 84,000 Americans after Trump dismissed the pandemic as simply a type of flu that would go away quickly.

On Thursday, May 14, 2020, Ed Mazza of Huffpost said Obama did not react to statement of Senate majority leader Sen. Mitch McConnell should have “kept his mouth shut” after he was quoted as saying in a private meeting with former staffers that Trump’s response to the pandemic as “an absolute chaotic disaster,” as reported by Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News. McConnell drew criticism from both sides of the aisle, including from the former chair of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele, for telling Obama to shut up. He tweeted: “I'm sure Mitch is aware that a grown ass black man who happens to be a former president has agency to speak his mind on how his successor is managing this crisis, especially since his successor has yet to keep ‘his mouth shut’ about him. And ‘classless’?”

In a very civil comment despite Trump’s daily hurling of insults and lies about the criminal culpability of Obama for leaving a “broken system” that could not confront the pandemic, the former President tweeted: “Despite all the time that’s been lost, we can still make real progress against the virus, protect people from the economic fallout, and more safely approach something closer to normal if we start making better policy decisions now.”

“Trump has repeatedly blamed his predecessor for his own administration’s slow response to the pandemic, which has now killed more than 84,000 people in the US. At one point, he blamed the Obama administration for leaving him “bad, broken tests” for the coronavirus despite the fact that the virus didn’t exist until last year. #coronavirusimpact #COVID19