Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” network chief political analyst and Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson said President Donald Trump’s leadership during the coronavirus pandemic has turned the United States into “the shithole country that nobody wants people from.”
Co-host Joe Scarborough asked, “Did you ever think, Gene, in all of your years, that the United States of America would be in such a poor condition, a Third World condition when it came to health care and the government’s handling of a pandemic, that we wouldn’t be able to go to other countries?”
Robinson said, “Never in my life, in my wildest imagination did I think we could conceivably be in this position. And we don’t have to be. It didn’t have to be this way. We could have done what other developed countries did. We could have properly shut down the economy, driven the infection rate very low, and by now, we would be cautiously reopening, and we’d have a caseload that was similar to those of the rest of the world, basically, because we can’t go anywhere. And Donald Trump didn’t do that, because he thought the virus was a hoax or he didn’t understand it or confused World War I and World War II and 1917.”
He added, “It’s just appalling, and shocking, really, that we’re in this position. But this is where we are. We are pariahs. We are, we are the shithole country that nobody wants people from. That’s us now.”
Scarborough said, “Yeah. It’s amazing. Donald Trump’s ignorance of history, Donald Trump’s ignorance of medicine, Donald Trump’s ignorance of epidemiology, Donald Trump’s refusal to listen to his experts have put us in this position.”
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