Thursday on CNN, former Vice President Al Gore accused President Donald Trump of “recklessly rolling the dice” with Americans’ lives in an attempt to bring back the economy and win reelection.
Gore said, “Not much joy in answering your question because, you know, I try to navigate away from a partisan dimension of this. We’re in an election year, and I’m in a different political party than the president. So you can take what I say with that as background. Really what’s at stake here is so much more important than that. And honestly, he has failed as president, particularly on this challenge. The warnings were ignored. I spent eight years starting every single day with a lengthy report from the intelligence committee, and there are very few occasions where there was a stark warning about grave danger to the country. And whenever there was such an occasion we stopped and said hold the show here, get the FBI, get the CIA, get whoever was involved over. We need to learn about this.”
He continued, “Then after the warnings were missed, he has failed to mobilize the resources of the federal government to straighten out this testing catastrophe. To get the swabs and the so-called reagents, they need to do the tests and the gowns and masks and all the other stuff, he has not done that. And now I think we’re in grave danger. I have to tell you both, I think we are seeing the start of a botched reopening. I think that the president appears to be engaging in magical thinking again. And what I mean by that is, you know, a couple of months ago he said one day it’s just going to magically disappear. It seems as if he may be recklessly rolling the dice, hoping that he can goose the economy just enough in the third quarter of this year to enhance his reelection prospects. Hoping that he can divert the blame for the extra tens of thousands of Americans who the doctors tell us will die as a result of this and blame it on the Chinese or former President Obama or whoever.”
He added, “Instead of doing what a president needs to do. First of all, be a watchman on the tower looking for danger, then responding to it, mobilizing the government, reaching out, not just to your political base, but to all Americans. Empathizing, showing some empathy because people are grieving and suffering. And then when there’s a problem that can only be resolved with the leadership of the president of the United States. He needs to take ahold of that, but instead, he said, literally, I take no responsibility. It is unfathomable to me. I’m sorry to get wound up about this, but I see what he’s doing and it is the complete opposite of what the United States of America needs in the presidency right now.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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