Mitch McConnell blames Obama for Trump's failed pandemic response

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell went on a Trump campaign live stream Monday night and falsely claimed that former President Barack Obama left Donald Trump without any plan to handle a future pandemic.

“Clearly the Obama administration did not leave to this administration, any kind of game plan for something like this,” McConnell said in an interview with Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump.

That claim is untrue.

The Obama administration quite literally left Trump with a pandemic playbook — which Trump ignored.

Politico reported in March that the Trump administration was briefed about the 69-page pandemic playbook in 2017 — which laid out steps the Trump administration should have started to take back in January, when the world learned of the virus.

The steps included procuring enough personal protective equipment for medical providers, which the Trump administration did not do early on, and ensuring there are proper testing capabilities to detect the virus, which the Trump administration also did not do.

“We literally left them a 69-page Pandemic Playbook…. that they ignored. And an office called the Pandemic Preparedness Office… that they abolished. And a global monitoring system called PREDICT .. that they cut by 75%,” Ronald Klain, who served as Obama’s Ebola czar, tweeted in response to McConnell’s false claim.

McConnell, for his part, was echoing Trump’s attempts to shift blame for his administration’s failed coronavirus response onto anyone but himself.

Trump has falsely blamed Obama for giving him faulty coronavirus tests, even though Obama couldn’t have created a test for a virus that didn’t exist yet when he was president.

And he’s also blamed China for the virus spread, even though he once praised China’s transparency.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.