President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic has been “an absolute chaotic disaster” for America, Barack Obama has said, the starkest assessment yet from the former president about his successor’s “anemic and spotty” response to the global health crisis.
Obama slammed Trump during a private call on Friday night with people who worked for him in the White House and across his administration, according to US media reports.
In a 30-minute conversation with members of the Obama Alumni Association, the former president, a Democrat, said the poor response to the coronavirus outbreak served as a critical reminder for why strong government leadership is needed during a global crisis.
During the call, Obama said his Republican successor’s approach to government was partly to blame for the US response to coronavirus.
Over 78,000 people have now died in the US and the country has 1.2 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 - both by far the highest in the world.
Trump’s approach to the coronavirus pandemic has oscillated. In February he dismissed it, saying it would disappear, but by mid-March he acknowledged its severity.
“It would have been bad even with the best of government,” Obama was quoted as saying in the call.
“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 operationalised in our government,” Obama, who was US president for two consecutive terms from 2009 to 2017, said.
The call was intended to encourage former Obama staffers to become more engaged in ex-vice president Joe Biden’s White House bid against Trump in the November presidential elections, CNN reported.
“This election that’s coming up -- on every level -- is so important because what we’re going to be battling is not just a particular individual or a political party,” Obama, who endorsed Biden officially last month, said.
“What we’re fighting against is these long-term trends in which being selfish, being tribal, being divided, and seeing others as an enemy -- that has become a stronger impulse in American life.”
Obama used the strongest words for the Trump administration’s handling of the coronavirus crisis and its worldview, CNN noted.
“It’s part of the reason why the response to this global crisis has been so anemic and spotty,” Obama commented.
The comments were first reported by Yahoo News, which obtained an audio recording of the call.