Republicans on Capitol Hill are already admitting that President Donald Trump can't do two things at once.
The Atlantic explained Tuesday that it has become clear that the White House was focused solely on impeachment and nothing else during the last part of 2019 and in early 2020.
Last week Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) blamed Democrats for impeaching Trump, making it clear that the president was too distracted by trying to keep his job that he wasn't able to do his job.
The outbreak "came up while we were, you know, tied down in the impeachment trial. And I think it diverted the attention of the government, because everything, every day, was all about impeachment," he said during an appearance on NBC News contributor Hugh Hewitt's talk show.
Even Trump attacked Democrats, saying that they were the ones that were distracted so they did nothing to stop the coronavirus.
“All she did was focus on impeachment,” Trump said, referring to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). “She didn’t focus on anything having to do with pandemics, she didn’t focus on — she focused on impeachment and she lost. And she looked like a fool.”
In fact, the Democrats passed more bills during the impeachment hearings in 2019 than Republicans had in the year previously.
"Over the past two months, President Donald Trump has deployed a dizzying array of lies about why the coronavirus wasn’t a cause for concern, then defenses to excuse or deny his deadly mishandling of the pandemic," wrote The Atlantic. "The virus was under control in the United States, he argued. The warm weather would make it go away. It would miraculously vanish. It was China’s fault, and limiting travel from China had solved the problem. It was the media’s fault for exaggerating things. It was Barack Obama’s fault. States in urgent need of ventilators should have purchased the medical equipment months ago, and it isn’t the president’s responsibility to fix that problem."
Tuesday, a memo from Trump economist Peter Navarro surfaced showing that he was sounding the alarm about the virus back in January. While it's unclear if Trump read the memo, it's clear that someone in the administration was talking about the virus as a serious threat to the United States for months while the president was claiming it was nothing more than the flu.
"The intent may be to shift blame, but the argument is actually a concession of Trump’s own failure," the report explained. "While Trump’s defense of his leadership has been erratic, one theme has been the insistence that—despite a great deal of evidence to the contrary—he has handled the crisis excellently. At every stage, he has congratulated himself for a job well done, even insisting that 'we altogether have done a very good job' while warning Americans to expect as many as 200,000 deaths from the virus."
