Wednesday on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360,” presidential historian and network contributor Douglas Brinkley accused President Donald Trump of failing in his response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Cooper said, “The president declared himself a wartime president. If you declare that and then you don’t follow through on it, and you have a huge death toll, I mean, do you think his legacy will be defined by his response to COVID?”
Brinkley said, “I think it really will be. I mean, the big bell rang. We had the big crisis, one of the worst ever, and he basically went AWOL. He got in a denial mode, and then he worried about himself only.”
He continued, “We look at presidents that we want to feel the empathy of an F.D.R. telling Depression people, ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself,’ and pulling the country together. Or Ronald Regan after the Challenger disaster in 1986. Or Bill Clinton in Oklahoma City, on and on. There are all these great moments. Today should be a day of national mourning that we hit the 100,000-mark. He should be leading that, showing the open-heartedness of America, that there were mistakes, there were blunders. But instead, he refuses to have a heart, and that’s the part that makes me most sad about what’s happening here. It’s not just the bungled policies, bad decision-making, but it’s a president who doesn’t seem to ever be able to express love to people unless they’re ardent Trump supporters, and it makes him sort of a pathetic figure.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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