MSNBC's Joe Scarborough blasted President Donald Trump for drowning in self-pity instead of offering solutions to alleviate the coronavirus crisis.
The "Morning Joe" co-hosts played a video clip of Trump repeatedly complaining during his daily COVID-19 briefing about the money he had lost by serving as president, and they both were appalled.
"Obviously, we've been very concerned from the very beginning, we've expressed our concerns about the president and starting in January, the intel agencies warning him that a pandemic was coming that could really be deadly," Scarborough said. "Also, very concerned about the president saying at rallies that the press was whipping this up into a frenzy and to a hoax level, been concerned about people with cable news shows talking about how this was just -- the press was trying to get Donald Trump through this. A lot of things to be very concerned about, the president saying if you want to test you can get a test just weeks ago and still that not happening."
Scarborough said the president's behavior during these daily briefings were alarming, and showed he's still not taking the crisis as seriously as he should.
"I thought Friday and Saturday's press conferences were -- I'll just say it -- absolutely frightening, and the president, of course, went on tangents and can't stay on script," he said. "He devolves into self- pity, and that is a very bad look for a commander-in-chief in the time of a crisis. Also, for the life of me, I don't understand why he's not using all the powers that he's using to really coordinate a national response, like FDR coordinated a national response in World War II. He's still holding back, he's still deferring to governors. It's almost like he wants to blame governors if things go badly. Now, Harry Truman said the buck stops here, and in a pandemic, the buck doesn't stop with a governor -- the buck stops with the White House."
"This was the mistake George W. Bush made during Katrina," Scarborough added, "and those of us that were on the ground in Louisiana and Mississippi know that federal government wasn't there because they were waiting for the state to come in and save the day. The state didn't have the resources or the leadership to do it. The pandemic starts at the top, [and it] still looks like Donald Trump doesn't understand that."
