Joe Biden, the likely Democratic challenger to confront President Trump in 2020, took to Twitter Thursday night to criticize the White House response to the coronavirus outbreak.
“President Obama and I left a playbook for President Trump on how to fight pandemics. He flatly ignored it. And we all pay the price every day, ”Biden tweeted.
The tweet was noted by Richard Grenell, Trump’s former acting Director of National Intelligence, who replied, “Did you know how to stop a virus that started in China and didn’t scream from the basement?”
A record number of confirmed coronavirus infections and deaths have re-emerged in the southern and western states, with hospitals on the edge and fears worldwide that the resurgence of the pandemic is just beginning.
More than 13.5 million infections have been confirmed worldwide and more than 588,000 have died, according to a count by Johns Hopkins University.
Democrats and the Biden campaign have been working to describe the Trump White House as woefully unprepared to respond to the pandemic. Trump has said he inherited a broken system and has called Barack Obama “extremely incompetent.”
Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, rejected a new poll on Thursday that showed that most Americans believe Biden would handle the coronavirus pandemic better than Trump.
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“What have you done in the basement for the Americans?” Meadows rhetorically asked host Martha MacCallum after she cited a Quinnipiac poll that showed 59 percent of registered voters believe Biden would do a better job of dealing with the outbreak than Trump.
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“I’m just telling you what the numbers are,” MacCallum replied.
Charles Charles Creitz of Fox News and Associated Press contributed to this report.
