A former spokesperson for the Republican National Committee slammed President Donald Trump for disregarding Nevada’s coronavirus health ban on large gatherings to host an indoor campaign rally in Henderson.
Tim Miller, in a blistering op-ed for the conservative news website The Bulwark, wrote Monday that everything about Sunday’s event — featuring mostly maskless Trump supporters who failed to heed social distancing guidelines ― was “fucking appalling.” Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak (D) denounced Trump earlier as “reckless and selfish.”
It was a “truly shocking and unimaginably wheels-off undertaking given that it came amid a pandemic that is still killing a thousand Americans a day and with wildfires making much of the West Coast uninhabitable,” wrote Miller, a longtime Republican who served as the RNC’s deputy communications director on Mitt Romney’s 2012 run for president. Miller was later the communications director on Jeb Bush’s unsuccessful 2016 presidential campaign.
Miller said Trump’s rally ― his first large indoor campaign event since June’s poorly attended show in Tulsa, Oklahoma ― “was so appalling that it would stand out as the single most appalling and reckless political event hosted by any presidential nominee in my lifetime before yesterday by a long shot, if you just didn’t count anything else that Donald Trump did.”
Tulsa’s health director has said Trump’s rally there “likely contributed” to a spike in coronavirus cases. Former GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain attended and later died from COVID-19, although there’s no proof where he caught it.
Trump has “numbed” many people with his conveyor belt of scandals, Miller wrote, urging people to continue speaking against the president’s outrageous behavior.
“All the president’s grotesqueries matter,” Miller concluded. “This is just the latest.”
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