Obama calls Trump’s handling of COVID-19 epidemic a ‘chaotic disaster’

WASHINGTON: Former President Barack Obama has criticised President Donald Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 epidemic as an “absolute chaotic disaster.”

Obama’s comments came during a meeting with 3,000 members of the Obama Alumni Association, people who served in his administration.

Obama also said the Justice Department’s decision to drop charges against Michael Flynn, the former Trump national security adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in the Russian probe, endangers the rule of law in the US.

According to Yahoo News, Obama urges former staffers to join him in rallying behind Joe Biden as he plans to take on Trump in the upcoming presidential election.

“What we’re fighting against is these long-term trends in which being selfish, being tribal, being divided, and seeing others as an enemy — that has become a stronger impulse in American life,” Obama told his former staffers.

Obama said “It’s part of the reason why the response to this global crisis has been so anemic and spotty,” he added.

“It would have been bad even with the best of governments. It has been an absolutely chaotic disaster when that mindset – of ‘what’s in it for me’ and ‘to heck with everybody else’ – when that mindset is operationalized in our government,” he said.

President Donald Trump has been criticized as essentially abdicating any leadership role in guiding the country through one of its worst crises in a century, leaving states on their own to fight with the plague and even bid against each other to get critical medical equipment on the open market or abroad.

Opponents say, Trump, after first downplaying the threat posed by the COVID-19, fruitless precious time in February as the pandemic spread in America and his administration did little to stock up on testing kits and other medical equipment or to create a solid national policy.

The United States by far leads the world in the number of coronavirus infections, at nearly 1.3 million, and deaths, with more than 77,000.