Tuesday on MSNBC’s “All In,” former Obama administration deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes accused President Donald Trump of playing a “ghoulish number game” to minimize “the failure of the Trump administration to prepare for this.”
Rhodes said, “Two things intersecting here. One is the failure of the Trump administration to prepare for this. And then to find any justification it can to minimize the perception of the damage this is doing to somehow justify their failure to take this seriously. The other is, let’s face it — there’s been a long-standing, deep-rooted sense of anti-government conspiracy theories from the right, that is part of the political force in this nation that gave rise to Trump, and to Trumpism.”
He continued, “Yeah, we’ve heard throughout this crisis, some people are saying the quiet part out loud. You had President Trump saying he wasn’t going to take in this cruise ship that was docked offshore because he wanted to keep the numbers down, which was a bit of a tell that perhaps the failure to get adequate testing is because he wanted to keep the numbers down. Then you had officials like the Lieutenant Governor of Texas say we can’t afford to have the economy close. We have to get the economy going. A lot of powerful interests in this country do have an interest in resuming the economy and minimizing the damage to their bottom line, even if it means, literally, that people are going to die. We just lived through a month in which over 50,000 Americans died. That doesn’t happen in the flu. That never happened in the flu. That doesn’t happen in a year in a flu season. Nothing close to that, right? And so I think there’s kind of a moral bankruptcy that people can see in terms of the impact that this is having against what people are saying.”
Rhodes added, “No terrorist could ever kill 50,000 Americans. It’s impossible, right? And yet that is justified on the air of that other cable channel, in a way that this is being minimized.”
He concluded, “These are human beings, with Trump it’s almost like this ghoulish numbers game in an effort to make sure someone looks good or bad. We can measure how we are doing in this country against coronavirus, as against how every other country in the world is doing. And if you look at the number of cases and the number of deaths in this country, clearly we’re not measuring up. The answer to that is not to minimize it and say it’s not really that serious. The answer is to do better and take this more seriously. ”
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