Former Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice said on Monday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “All In” that President Donald Trump had “refused to understand the world that we live in, the nature of the threats we face.”
She cited the coronavirus pandemic.
Rice said, “I think American voters who are focussed on our international standing have to be extraordinarily dismayed. Poll after poll shows that our allies don’t trust us, that our confidence and approval of the people is in the gutter. And, yet, more importantly, we are not seeing out of the president the leadership that we need to keep us safe. National security is about keeping the American people safe, and we have lost over 200,000 Americans to COVID-19. The vast majority of whom we have lost in substantial measure because the president of the United States has failed in his leadership. He’s lied to the American people about the virus in its severity, and he has done very little to nothing to have a plan to get ahead of this. We still don’t have testing straight. We still don’t have preparations in place for when flu converging with COVID. Our kids aren’t in school, and our economy has suffered with 30 million Americans out of work. That is failed leadership, and that is a national security concern as it even overlaps with the domestic simultaneously.”
Anchor Chris Hayes said, “It’s striking when you say that there has been reporting in Bob Woodward’s book that Robert O’Brian has a position that you once held with Barack Obama warned Trump in January this would be the biggest national security threat he has faced. What the military does and, you know, 9/11 and attacks and violence visited to us by others that we have to defend militarily when we have lost more people to this than many wars going back. It says something about how we even conceive of that term national security.”
Rice said, “It’s been a while since we’ve had traditionalist old school conceptions of national security. Certainly, in the Obama administration, we understood the threat of pandemic disease to be a very serious national security threat. We learned that through the HINI, before Ebola. They had dealt with a major flu global pandemic and, you know, issues like disease, like climate change like proliferation, these challenges that don’t respect borders, that may not come in the form of a barrel of a gun pointed at us by a hostile adversary, they’re still national security threats. And one of the big problems with President Trump is he has refused to understand the world that we live in, the nature of the threats we face and done nothing, absolutely nothing when it comes to defending us.”
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