Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Go. J.B. Pritzker (D-IL) argued that President Donald Trump “does not understand the word federal.”
Host Jake Tapper said, “President Trump said yesterday that everyone needed to, quote, ‘stop playing this game with governors about allocating medical equipment from the federal government.’ Then I want you to take a listen to what the president said Friday about the Trump administration’s new line of argument about the federal stockpile of medical supplies and devices.”
In a clip, Trump said, “We have a federal stockpile, and they have state stockpiles. Frankly, they were, many of the states were totally unprepared for this. So we had to go into the federal stockpile. We’re not an ordering clerk. They have to have for themselves.”
Tapper asked, “What’s your reaction, governor?”
Pritzker said, “Well, the president does not understand the word federal. Federal Emergency Management Agency, we have a state emergency management agency, but if he were right, why would we need a Federal Emergency Management Agency? It’s because individual states can’t possibly do what the federal government can do. We don’t have a Defense Production Act. There’s no way we could stockpile in anticipation of a pandemic that no one anticipated. Yet, the federal government is responsible for doing precisely that.”
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