Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Washington Post columnist George Will said President Donald Trump had turned the United States into “pitiful, helpless giant,” with his administration’s repose to the coronavirus pandemic.
Host Chuck Todd said, “The other thing we have been watching is an amazing amount of polling coming out showing President Trump in a rough place, and in a place that seems as if he can’t climb out of. George Will, in 1980 the Iran hostage crisis, I feel like we’re watching a similar thing with the virus. At first, there was a rally around Carter and then obviously, the failed attempt at rescue, and just over time, he’d lose faith and the public sort of lost faith in his ability to lead. I’m wondering, is this—are we going to look back in December and say yeah, that’s the moment we hit that, and we hit that in July with this virus?”
Will said, “This is like Katrina only worse. In the Katrina moment, people looked at Mr. Bush’s response and said the Bush administration isn’t behaving as well as we think it could. The Katrina moment, it was national, this is international. The pandemic has struck the entire planet, and so we have international metrics of how other nations are doing with this, and it doesn’t look that good. The man who came in and said, ‘I’m going to make America great again,’ is presiding over an America that is largely around the world pitting today. In April 1970 Richard Nixon went on national television and said we must invade Cambodia to clean up the sanctuaries of the North Vietnamese otherwise we will look like a pitiful, helpless giant and I’m afraid that the United States floundering in its attempt to deal with this virus looks like a pitiful, helpless giant.”
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