Biden Claims Trump Was Afraid to Act on COVID: He Was Worried ‘the Stock Market Might Fall’

Joe Biden accused President Donald Trump on Monday of not having taken the novel coronavirus threat seriously, claiming when the virus first emerged, the commander-in-chief was “worried that if he started talking about saving people’s lives, the stock market might fall.”

The former vice president, who has consistently criticized the Trump administration’s pandemic response, told the AFL-CIO in a special Labor Day address that the White House has been too focused on the economy throughout the pandemic. Biden, in particular, claimed that Trump’s concerns about not undermining the stock market at the start of the crisis came at the expense of public health and the safety of essential workers.

“President Trump keeps talking about how great his economy is, how great the stock market is,” he told the union. “The only reason he didn’t have the guts to take on COVID, why he threw up the white flag – he was worried that if he started talking about saving people’s lives, the stock market might fall.”

Proceeding to claim that the crisis “had been great for [Trump’s] rich friends,” the former vice president argued that the administration was “out of touch.”

“Millions of people out of work, evictions on the rise, 20 million people worried about whether they’re going to lose their homes because they have trouble making their mortgage payments, healthcare being taken away,” Biden said, before alleging that the “pandemic had crushed our country.”

Since the onset of the coronavirus, Biden has frequently attacked Trump on the campaign trail for not doing enough to mitigate the pandemic’s economic fallout. Most notably, the former vice president has accused the White House of putting the interests of big corporations first in its coronavirus relief effort, the CARES Act, while not doing enough to save small businesses.

The attacks have continued, even as Breitbart News has reported that a number of the former vice president’s donors have benefited from the Trump administration’s relief efforts. Similarly, the Wall Street Journal noted in August that a healthcare firm run by Biden’s son-in-law also benefited from more than $350,000 in forgivable loans from the Paycheck Protection Program, a coronavirus relief program established to help businesses continue making payroll during the pandemic.