- President Donald Trump said Monday that he would not have mentioned the resignation of former President Barack Obama after more than 160,000 people in the U.S. died from the coronavirus.
- “No, I would not have done that,” Trump said. “I love what we were able to do.”
- In 2014, a few weeks before the first travel-associated case of Ebola was diagnosed in the US, Trump suggested that Obama should resign.
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President Donald Trump on Monday said he would not have called for the dismissal of Barack Obama after more than 160,000 people in the US died of coronavirus.
Speaking to reporters at the White House, Trump suggested he would not blame Obama if he led the country through one of the worst pandemics in modern history.
“No, I would not have done that,” Trump said. “I love what we were able to do.”
“If we did not close our country, we would have killed one and a half or two million people already,” Trump added. “We just mentioned it, now we do not have to close it. We understand the disease. Nobody understood it, because no one has seen anything like it.”
Trump’s remarks mark the rare occasion in which he refused to blame his predecessor for his widely criticized response to the coronavirus.
While Trump was still a reality TV star and brokered real estate as a private citizen, he repeatedly attacked Obama on an array of issues – including how the former president approached the Ebola outbreak in 2014. At the time, Trump described Obama as a “delusional failure” about his approach to Ebola, and claimed that Obama created the problem “much worse than it should be in the US.”
Just 11 people were treated for Ebola in the US during the 2014-2016 epidemic.
In September 2014, a few weeks before the first travel-associated case of Ebola was diagnosed in the US, Trump in a tweet suggested that Obama should resign.
“If Obama resigns NOW, and thereby does a great service to the country – I will give him a free life wave on one of my courses!” Trump tweeted at the time.
More than 5 million people in the U.S. have been diagnosed with the coronavirus and more than 163,000 people have died since Monday, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
