Wednesday on MSNBC, anchor Chris Hayes criticized Trump administration’s push to reopen schools U.S. coronavirus response as a failure in the past few weeks, and tonight he opened going off on President Donald Trump’s push for schools across the country to be reopened.
Hayes said, “Countries all over the world have successfully reopened their schools. Denmark was the first country in Europe to do so, reopening their primary schools on April 20th. In Wuhan, schools started reopening at the end of April. In Singapore, schools reopened at the end of June and even started some extracurricular activities. Of course, this hasn’t all gone smoothly everywhere. There have been plenty of places where the virus flared up, and they had to close again. But this proves it is possible. And we all desperately need American schools to reopen. Pediatricians, parents, educators, basically anyone who deals with kids, they all agree it should be a priority at every level of government and for all of American society to get full-time, in-person school open again in the fall.”
He continued, “Right now, that is looking unlikely because we have the worst coronavirus response in the world. That has not stopped the president. He is now trying to reopen schools the exact same way he tried to reopen the economy, despite the fact that his push to reopen the economy created the disastrous and catastrophic conditions we are in now, which is what makes the school problem so difficult to solve.”
Hayes added, “Unlike anywhere else in the world, the virus is on a huge upward spike in this country. We are setting records with the number of cases nearly every day. There are massive outbreaks in Arizona and Florida and Texas and South Carolina and Alabama. New cases are increasing in 38 U.S. states and territories. We have already seen more cases than anywhere else in the world. All the while, the president has been focussed on one thing, his re-election. And his re-election — he thinks depends on economic growth and getting back to normal.”
He concluded, “The last person in the world you can trust right now with the safety of your kids is Donald Trump. Not only because he’s willing to change or ignore scientific guidelines about how to keep Americans safe, or because he’s threatening to cut off funds for schools when what they need is a massive amount of money to afford all the changes needed to make it safe to bring back students, but also because the best-laid plans are not going to survive first contact with an outbreak. This is the fundamental problem for everything right now, from elementary school to the NBA. Other countries suppressed the virus and have kept it suppressed. We never did that. And now we are trying to figure out how to live in a burning building, as opposed to putting the fire out. It’s not going to work.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN