Obama makes 'critical argument' about Trump’s 'culpability for 100s of 1000s of preventable deaths'

Former President Barack Obama made the case for Vice president Kamala Harris during the 2024 Democratic nominee's Las Vegas rally Saturday night, by revealing that his successor — Donald Trump — ignored the pandemic playbook Obama's administration developed for him.

"When I was president, I had been talking to scientists for a while so during my last year in office, and we put together a pandemic playbook for how to deal with the eventuality of a pandemic," the 44th president of the United States began. "Because scientists had been saying, with globalization and travel, etc. — rising populations — that at some pointe there was going to be a pandemic. So, I said to my team, 'We gotta have a plan.'"

"Just like you do for hurricanes, or tornadoes, or natural disasters," Obama continued. "And so, we put together this whole playbook. And we practiced the playbook. We did all the agencies. 'This is how we're going to make sure that the public health systems in all the states are working — here's how we're gonna think about the schools. And when Donald Trump came in, we gave over this playbook to them. And he ignored it."

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The Harris ally went on, "Three years later a pandemic hits. I want to be fair on this. No matter who was going to president at the time, this was going to be a problem. This was a generational pandemic. People were gonna get sick. People were gonna die. We didn't have a vaccine right away. But if you look at a country like Canada, their per capita death rate was 40 percent lower than it was here in the United States. That’s more than 400,000 people. People’s grandparents, people’s fathers, people’s moms, who would’ve been alive if Donald Trump had just paid attention and tried to follow the plan that we gave him. It might have been somebody in your family that could’ve been impacted. So, if somebody tells you that this doesn’t make a difference — having somebody competent, somebody who cares about you, who listens to ordinary people, who listens to people who are experts in these areas — if you hear somebody say, 'It doesn't matter,' it does matter, and at some point, it will make a difference to them."

Former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan commented: Absolutely crucial argument that Obama is making about the pandemic, and Trump’s culpability for 100s of 1000s of preventable deaths, 17 days out from the election, that Democrats - Biden, Harris, Pelosi, Schumer, Jeffries - should have been making nonstop about Trump and the pandemic for *the past 4 years* instead of brushing Covid under the rug and trying to move forward without any accountability for Trump and co. Madness."

Writer Hemant Mehta replied: "2020 would have been less traumatic if Democrats—or any sensible adults—were in charge. Another Trump term would mean more harm no matter which party you support."

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