Democrats accusing President Donald Trump of mishandling the executive branch’s response to the coronavirus outbreak were focused on impeachment during the month of January instead of addressing the viral threat, said Henry Olsen, Washington Post columnist and author of The Working Class Republican: Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue-Collar Conservatism.
Olsen offered his remarks while guest-hosting Thursday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight alongside Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Rebecca Mansour.
“Why was no one on the Democratic side taking the leadership that they claim they want in order to educate the American people?” asked Olsen. “We spent the first month of this year dealing with impeachment 24-7-365. Do you think any of that time might have been better spent talking about what Americans could do to deal with this? Again, if it’s so blindingly obvious, whose fault is that?”
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Democrats’ impeachment push consumed governmental and public attention at the expense of responding to and informing Americans of the coronavirus outbreak, assessed Olsen.
Olsen continued, “It’s not President Trump who said, ‘Gee, I just would really like to be the first president impeached in 20 years.’ It’s the other side. So again, I think that there’s a lot of attempts to say, ‘Look at Trump! Look at Trump! Look at Trump!’ and I think Trump could have acted faster, and on the other hand, he had his mind on something that he didn’t want to be thinking about and it wasn’t something that was conducive to the life and health of Americans.”
“It seems like a million years ago, but we are five weeks away from when impeachment was finally resolved by the Senate, and we’re maybe four weeks away from people talking about [if] John Bolton [will] testify before the House,” recalled Olsen. “This is not anything that should be laid at the desk of President Trump. This is the priority of the other side that decided they would rather talk about this then talk about how to deal with the possibility of a pandemic, or to bring it up if they felt the president wasn’t paying attention to it, to bring it up in a rational way.”
Olsen noted Joe Biden’s criticisms of Trump regarding the coronavirus outbreak during a press conference held by the former vice president on Thursday.
“Joe Biden gave this speech today about presidential leadership,” Olsen stated, “Well, presidential leadership, if I listen to the experts, should have been done two months ago. Where was Joe Biden when his campaign was faltering in Iowa, was dying in the snows of New Hampshire? Maybe talking about a virus and a pandemic and how he was ahead of the curve and thinking about the lives and health of Americans, maybe that would have been a good thing to be talking about instead of talking about the things he’s been talking about.”
Olsen determined, “Either it wasn’t as blindingly obvious as we hear, or there’s a lot of bipartisan blame for overlooking the obvious. You can’t have it both ways. “
Olsen contrasted America’s situation with other parts of the world in the context of the coronavirus outbreak.
“Let’s look at Europe,” invited Olsen, “Everybody on the left wants us to be more like Europe. Is there single European country where they can say, ‘Gee, if only we had been more like the Germans, or only we had been more like the Swedes?’ No, there is nobody in the Western world [who handled this well]. There are Eastern semi-democracies like Singapore which did it well.
Olsen concluded, “We’ve got more collectivist democracies like South Korea that really shut down in a way that might have been pushed back on early, but certainly they didn’t catch it at the containment phase as early as has been recommended. There is nobody who did it, and if nobody did it right, maybe we shouldn’t spend a lot of time singling out one person for allegedly doing it wrong.”
Breitbart News Tonight broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot channel 125 weeknights from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern or 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific.
Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter.
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