Former President Barack Obama (D) says the federal government’s response to the coronavirus outbreak is “spotty” and an “absolute chaotic disaster.”
But, Larry Kudlow, the head of the National Economic Council, says he does not “understand” what Obama has to criticize about the response.
“With all due respect to the former president, I really don’t want to get into a political back and forth here, I just don’t know what he’s talking about,” Kudlow said in an interview on ABC News’ “This Week” on Sunday.
“With all the assistance we’ve done. With all the infrastructure that we, the Trump administration, working with governors, and mayors, and with Congress. With respect to testing, with respect to all manner of PPE medical equipment, with respect to ventilators,” he added.
Kudlow went on to talk about President Donald Trump’s efforts to lean on the private sector to produce equipment and testing needed to help combat the coronavirus outbreak.
“I don’t understand what President Obama is saying. It just sounds so darn political,” Kudlow said.
He continued:
“What we have done may not be 100 percent perfect. These things happen once every 100 years, but the overall picture is we created a massive health and safety infrastructure to deal with the pandemic here in the United States, and judging from the results, where there has been a flattening in the rate of growth in infection rates and mortality rates. It’s working. We’re preparing to reopen the economy.”
Watch the video below:
Larry Kudlow says Obama's criticism of federal response to COVID-19 “sounds so darn political.”
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) May 10, 2020
While it “may not be 100 percent perfect,” we “created a massive health and safety infrastructure” to deal with the pandemic and “it’s working,” Kudlow adds. https://t.co/NX6cyzXxZl pic.twitter.com/uTk571lrT8
Kudlow’s comments were in response to leaked audio from a phone call Obama had with former members of his administration, as IJR reported.
During the call, Obama ripped into the government’s handling of the outbreak, “It would have been bad even with the best of governments. It has been an absolute 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.”
The latest data finds that more than 1,300,000 confirmed cases of the virus in the U.S. and over 79,000 deaths.
