Maryland's GOP Gov. Larry Hogan brutally rips Trump's 'hopeless' response to COVID-19

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan excoriated President Donald Trump's handling of the coronavirus pandemic in a new Washington Post op-ed.

The Republican governor famously enlisted his wife, who was born in raised in South Korea, to ask that country's president Moon Jae-in for help securing COVID-19 test kits in the early days of the pandemic, a month after Trump insisted anyone who wanted one could get tested.

"This should not have been necessary," Hogan wrote. "I’d watched as the president downplayed the outbreak’s severity and as the White House failed to issue public warnings, draw up a 50-state strategy, or dispatch medical gear or lifesaving ventilators from the national stockpile to American hospitals."

"Eventually, it was clear that waiting around for the president to run the nation’s response was hopeless," he added. "If we delayed any longer, we’d be condemning more of our citizens to suffering and death. So every governor went their own way, which is how the United States ended up with such a patchwork response. I did the best I could for Maryland. Here’s what we saw and heard from Washington along the way."

Hogan, who had considered challenging Trump in the 2020 GOP primary, then laid out in painstaking detail damning evidence of the president's dereliction of duty.

"So many nationwide actions could have been taken in those early days but weren’t," Hogan said. "While other countries were racing ahead with well-coordinated testing regimes, the Trump administration bungled the effort. The test used by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention early on was fraught with inaccuracies, and onerous regulations hindered the nation’s private labs. The resulting disorganization would delay mass testing for almost two months and leave the nation largely in the dark as the epidemic spread."

"Meanwhile, instead of listening to his own public health experts, the president was talking and tweeting like a man more concerned about boosting the stock market or his reelection plans," he added.