President Donald Trump said Monday that he would not have called for the resignation of former President Barack Obama if his predecessor had been in his position because of the existing coronavirus pandemic and that more than 160,000 more people in the country had died.
Speaking to reporters at a briefing at the White House Monday, Trump defended the impressive death toll for COVID-19 and his own mismanagement of the virus, saying he would have blamed Obama if the Democratic leader had led the country through a pandemic that resulted in equally sad results.
“No, I wouldn’t have done that,” Trump said when asked through a reporter if he would have asked for Obama’s resignation. “I think what we were able to do is unbelievable.”
Trump’s comments Monday reflect a leader who must save appearances amid his own failed reaction to the pandemic.
“If we hadn’t closed our country, we would have had a million and a share or two million people dead,” Trump said, protecting a death toll that outperforms every other country in the world.
But President Trump has called for Obama’s resignation in pre-election campaigns in 2016 and less than a year after he delivered his own presidential candidacy.
Looking back on his social media record, Vox reported in February that President Trump posted about a hundred-hundred-lix of Ebola panic in 2014, attacking President Obama over his handling of the epidemic.
– Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 23, 2014
Trump demanded that Obama “apologize to the other Americans and resign” for a doctor’s escape from the Ebola outbreak, even though the virus ultimately did not spread to the United States. Two out of 11 inflamed people died in the United States from an Ebola outbreak in 2014-16, according to the CDC.
Taking a new step on Sunday, the United States reported millions of cases of coronavirus and passed more than 1,000 deaths per day during an era of a day last week.