Ronald Klain, who former President Barack Obama appointed to lead the U.S. response to the Ebola epidemic, on Friday ripped President Donald Trump and his administration’s messy handling of the coronavirus outbreak.
Klain — who was dubbed the “Ebola czar” — told MSNBC’s Ali Velshi there was a “crisis of both confidence and competence” in the way Trump’s White House was tackling the spread of the virus, which causes the COVID-19 respiratory disease.
“On the confidence side, anyone at this point in time who believes what Donald Trump says kind of gets what they deserve at this stage of the game,” said Klain.
Trump has told more than 16,000 lies during his time in office, according to The Washington Post.
“But the problem is that the administration has silenced the people we can trust,” Klain added, noting how top officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had essentially “been gagged” and stopped from talking in public about the outbreak, which he claimed added to the level of confusion and panic that it is causing.
“We can’t trust our president, and the people we can trust aren’t being allowed to tell us the truth,” he added.
(Check out the full interview above.)
Klain also appeared on CNN’s “Cuomo Prime Time,” where he suggested other countries were further ahead of America in terms of testing suspected carriers of the virus because “the White House was asleep on the job.”
“When we found out that this virus was spreading widely in China in December, in January, we should have rapidly accelerated the preparation and deployment of test kits in the U.S.,” he claimed.
“We’re just behind on producing the tests, we’re behind on getting them approved, we’re behind on getting them distributed — this should have been Job One of the coronavirus task force and what we’re seeing is, we’re just behind,” Klain added.