Never Trump stalwart, Iraq War advocate, and CNN analyst Max Boot has written an op-ed in in the Washington Post in which he claims that the coronavirus outbreak would not have been as bad if Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 presidential election.
“We couldn’t have avoided the coronavirus, but we could have ameliorated its effects,” he argues.
Boot, a military historian, calls coronavirus “the most foreseeable disaster in history” — though he did not tweet about it until February, particularly after it came up in the Democrat debate Feb. 25 in South Carolina. (His only tweet about “coronavirus” prior to Feb. 26 references a report by an eighth grader.)
In his op-ed, Boot claims that “Trump wasn’t paying attention” to intelligence reports. He fails to mention the travel ban on China that Trump imposed Jan. 31. (Boot has also mocked Trump’s travel ban on Europe, which was recommended and endorsed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious disease expert on the president’s coronavirus team.)
Boot writes:
Because of Trump’s negligence, the United States lost two months of response time — precious days that should have been used to test the population, produce more N95 masks and ventilators, and build new hospital beds. This past week, the Pentagon finally announced that a Navy hospital ship would be heading to New York — but it will take at least two weeks to get ready. Why wasn’t the deployment order given sooner? Even now, with the crisis upon us, Trump hesitates to use his full authority to order wartime production of ventilators needed to keep thousands of patients alive.
Utterly lacking in empathy, Trump is incapable of rallying a shell-shocked nation. When asked on Friday, “What do you say to Americans who are watching you right now who are scared?,” Trump launched into a tirade against the reporter who asked the question. Like the snake-oil salesman that he is, his version of reassurance is to tout miracle cures that have not been verified by medical science.
Boot’s reference to the question about Americans who are “scared” neglects to mention that Trump only reacted to the reporter, NBC’s Peter Alexander, after the latter accused the president of giving “false hope” to Americans. The NBC White House correspondent later issued a statement accusing Trump of lacking empathy for Americans.
At no point does Boot explain what Hillary Clinton would have done differently. He simply asserts that she is “a sane, sensible adult” — i.e. unlike Trump.
Read Boot’s full op-ed here.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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