On Friday’s “PBS NewsHour,” New York Times columnist David Brooks stated that while President Trump “has been a failure” at handling the coronavirus pandemic from the beginning, he isn’t completely to blame, because “It wasn’t Trump who went to the bars in Nevada and Arizona and Texas and California. That’s a country giving up. That’s a collective failure.” Brooks also stated that there have been repeated failures by institutions, such as the mistakes on testing made by the CDC and FDA.
Brooks said, “Well, Trump has been a failure at it since day one. He’s denied it. He’s had crackpot theories about it. He’s offered no leadership at all. But I have to say, when you look at 57,000 new cases one day, and 55,000 the day before, that’s not only President Trump. It wasn’t Trump who went to the bars in Nevada and Arizona and Texas and California. That’s a country giving up. That’s a collective failure.”
He added, “Well, we’ve had failures on all sorts of scales. The CDC messed up the first test. The FDA didn’t allow private testing. We’ve had just institutional failure after institutional failure. And I do think we have had social failure.”
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