Friday on MSNBC, House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC) said President Donald Trump deferring to governors in the national coronavirus pandemic was “tantamount to Nero fiddling while Rome burns.”
Clyburn said, “Why this president refuses to have a national strategy is beyond me. From the very beginning, he said he was going to leave it up to the states. He was not going to take responsibility. That’s not the way you combat a pandemic. This is a worldwide pandemic. This is a problem for every country in the world. And for this president to say we will leave it up to 50 different approaches, let each state fend for themselves, let states have competition with each other, that’s not the way to keep our country unified. I would hope that this president will pay attention not just to what I said but pay attention to those three experts sitting there in front of us.”
He added, “What we have found is that this White House is dealing with two sets of approaches. They are dealing with something that they enunciate publicly at a press conference or what the president may say. But they have sent out privately some guidelines for states to follow. And what we’re having here— I sent a letter out to four of those states that decided rather than follow the private information they’ve got from the White House they are following what the president is saying at his press conferences. And that’s why we sent them this letter. So I do believe that they’ve had it. In fact, Vanity Fair just revealed that they came up with a national strategy back in March, but they decided not to allow it to go forward because, at the time, they saw all the virus hanging out in New York, New Jersey, and other so-called blue states. So rather than implement a national strategy, they decided to pull back from that and put out this competition among the states so that they could maintain some political advantage. That’s the problem here. They’re not following the science. They’re not listening to the experts. They are pursuing a political agenda. That is tantamount to Nero fiddling while Rome burns. ”
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