Joe Biden wielded a stinging critique of President Trump’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic on Tuesday condemning his apparent surrender to the alarming crisis which has claimed about 128,000 lives in the United States.
“Donald Trump is in retreat,” the Democratic presidential nominee said, recalling how Trump once branded himself a “wartime president” and appealed to Americans to sacrifice together in the face of a shared enemy. Biden criticized the president for appearing to give up in a battle against the coronavirus pandemic which continues to gain the upper hand as it surges in hotspots across the United States.
“Now it’s almost July, and it seems like our wartime president has surrendered, waved the white flag and left the battlefield,” Biden said.
The former vice president railed on Trump’s recent attempt to strip close to 23 million Americans of health insurance in a last ditch effort to make good an a 2016 campaign promise to undo the work of his predecessor to secure health care for more Americans who could not afford it.
“We cannot continue like this,” Biden said, warning that Trump’s efforts to sow divisiveness over safety precautions like mask-wearing to curb the spread of the virus were dangerous and would continue to fuel the devastating loss to COVID-19 in the United Stated which has outpaced all other countries in reported positive cases. Biden chastised the president for both holding rallies that irresponsibly served as breeding grounds for infection and for flouting social distancing guidelines which put Americans at risk.
Biden has steadily increased his attacks on Trump’s failures in recent weeks. Addressing a reporter question about recent allegations of Trump’s inaction after receiving a written brief on Russia offering bounties to militants in Afghanistan for the killing of U.S. and coalition troops, Biden called Trump’s response in either case of knowing or being unaware a “dereliction.”
“If these allegations are true,” Biden added, “the public should conclude that this man is not fit to be president.”
