Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Deadline,” Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) said the Trump administration had a “vacuum of leadership” on the coronavirus outbreak, which has resulted in lives being lost that could have been prevented.
Harris said, “Starting with the Mayor London Breed, the mayor of San Francisco who was the first mayor in the country issue a to stay at home order to Gavin Newsom who’s provided extraordinary leadership. The vacuum of leadership here in Washington, D.C., has shifted leadership to our mayors and our county officials and our governors and in California, I say perhaps with a bit of a boastful pride, they’re doing an extraordinary job, but there’s a real crisis.”
She continued, “First of all, we need a president who takes seriously the tools at his disposal, including the Defense Production Act. Donald Trump delayed initiated it. It is still now only for a couple of corporations just at this late hour around ventilation. Remember, production requires time to produce the goods that people need to use on the street, such as what California needs. He needs to use the Defense Production Act to also then require that masks and testing are actually being produced. He has yet to do that.”
She added, “These are the moments that require a president to understand the ability that he or she has to meet the crisis at the moment, and frankly, I find this president has been inadequate.”
She concluded, “I mean, listen, real leadership means that in a moment of crisis you have the courage to speak truth and then act based on truth which requires embrace of facts and in this case an embrace of science. It’s tragic that Dr. Fauci and others have told us in the last 24 hours that we’re looking at the possibility of 100,000 to 250,000 lives being lost in a large part in a way that was preventable if we had acted sooner.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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