Van Jones: Trump ‘Doesn’t Actually Want to Solve’ Opioid Crisis, ‘He Wants to Demagogue About It’

On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” CNN Commentator and former Obama adviser Van Jones argued President Trump doesn’t want to solve the opioid crisis and merely wants to “demagogue” about the issue.

Jones said, “[T]his is one of the things that I think is criminal on the part of Trump. He, and the Republican Party during the primary, went out and actually found out — which a lot of people didn’t know, that people are dying all over the country. You know, one of my close friends, Prince, died of the same opioid crisis that’s killing people in coal country … So, you literally have a catastrophe, and you could do something about it right now. It would take money. It would take willpower. You’d have to bring people together. Instead, you do a press conference, a tweet, and talk about advertising. You’re not going to save people’s lives…with an advertising campaign. And he is a demagoguing his own base’s pain and suffering, and it’s outrageous.”

He added, “There are, in fact, medicines now. You have medically-assisted treatment, where you can get people to — instead of having the detox and die model, where you get people just well enough to go and overdose, you could actually fix it. But you’d have to bring people together to do it. And Trump doesn’t actually want to solve the problem. He wants to demagogue about it. In other words, the idea that there’s nothing we can do is false, false, false, and we need to get on this right now.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett