Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer issued a stark warning to President Donald Trump about his administration’s handling of the coronavirus, saying it “could be Trump’s Katrina.”
In an interview with Sirius XM host Dean Obeidallah on Thursday, the billionaire businessman questioned Trump’s ability to manage an outbreak of the COVID-19 virus, which the president controversially assigned to Vice President Mike Pence.
Trump “is absolutely incompetent,” said Steyer. “He stripped the Centers for Disease Control of its money and of its capability. He’s months late on this.”
He added:
This is a huge deal and he’s turning it over to Mike Pence? I can’t be more scared. This is a much bigger deal than I think people in the United States understand in terms of how many people are going to be infected and how much economic impact this is going to have. Trump is incompetent. He is doing a terrible job on this.
Steyer recalled Republicans being “up in arms” over the 2014 outbreak of the Ebola virus and hailed former President Barack Obama for dealing with it “masterfully” because “he believed in analysis and science.”
“That’s not what is happening here,” he lamented.
“I think this a huge, huge deal, because this is like George W. Bush with the hurricane and flooding down in New Orleans,” Steyer added. “It’s a total executive failure by an incompetent executive.”
The Bush administration was widely criticized by a slow and sloppy response to the devastating 2005 storm that caused an estimated $161 billion of damage and was responsible for more than 1,800 deaths.
Check out the interview here:
Steyer followed up Friday with a campaign email in which he claimed “we are witnessing a total failure on the part of the White House right now that risks a Katrina level disaster for our country.”
The “chaos that reigns inside the White House” puts “millions of American lives at risk,” the email said. It urged Trump to fully fund the CDC and to take the agency’s advice seriously by acting “immediately and appropriately to protect the lives of American citizens.”