Former GOP strategist Steve Schmidt on Monday rebuked President Donald Trump’s fumbling response to the coronavirus pandemic, suggesting the United States would not be facing “catastrophe” if former President Barack Obama were still in office.
“If Barack Obama was the president of the United States, this would not have happened,” the political analyst told MSNBC’s Ari Melber. The nationwide death toll from the public health crisis has now topped 81,000.
“We would have had competent professional people. We would have done what we needed to do early,” said Schmidt, who imagined how the federal response would have unfurled under the Obama administration.
“What would have happened is what happened during the Ebola crisis,” said Schmidt, a member of conservative attorney George Conway’s anti-Trump group, the Lincoln Project, which aims to defeat Trump in the 2020 election.
“We would have had someone like Ron Klain in charge of it, not the confederacy of dunces that we see running around the West Wing,” he added.
Schmidt, who quit the GOP in 2018, saying it had become “fully the party of Trump,” warned that “no amount of gaslighting, delusion, fantasy happy talk” from the president would change the fact it will take years to recover from the pandemic.
Check out the clip above and the full interview below:
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