Monday on MSNBC, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) said President Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic was to issue a travel ban from China that he said “just didn’t work.”
After that, the Connecticut Democrat accused Trump of having “gave up.”
Host Nicolle Wallace asked, “On a scale of one to ten, where do you rate the crisis of the leaders of the executive branch in charge of the pandemic?”
Murphy said, “Well, I mean, we have had just an absolute abysmal failure of leadership from the White House since the very beginning. Effectively, after the travel ban, a travel ban that just didn’t work, 400,000 people got in from those countries that were subject to the restrictions, after that, the President just gave up. The President and his team effectively gave up. They run a task force, they have press conferences, but they have effectively left the response to the states and to hospital systems and to municipalities. And even when they do try to intervene, it frankly makes the situation often much worse than if they had done nothing.”
He continued, “I mean, we’re going to have these officials appearing before us tomorrow, largely via video, because of this outbreak at the White House. And one of the clear questions we have for them is, are you making the situation better or worse by having a half-way hand into the supply chain? Right now, what keeps me up at night as we start to reopen Connecticut in about ten days is testing. And right now, the administration refuses to take control of the testing supply chain, but they keep their hand in it just enough so that no one really knows who’s in charge. Is it the White House that’s deciding where testing machines go? Is it the testing companies? Is it the highest bidder that gets them? So we need to understand what the White House and the administration is doing and what they’re not doing, so we can effectively plan a response. Sometimes, a little bit of action is almost worse than no action at all.”
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