'You’ve already killed enough Americans!' MSNBC's Morning Joe burns Trump's belated effort to fix COVID failures
MSNBC's Joe Scarborough ripped President Donald Trump for trying to clean up months of failures and inaction on the deadly coronavirus pandemic in a single media briefing.
The president delivered a relatively succinct and somber update on the pandemic, but the "Morning Joe" host said that wasn't nearly enough to atone for failures that had left 142,000 people dead.
"One day! One day! Out of the past six, seven months, where 140,000 Americans have died," Scarborough said. "Again, about two, two and a half times the number of deaths in Vietnam. He'll have one day where he'll say, well, maybe with all these people dying, maybe I should read my script, instead of lying about masks, instead of mocking Joe Biden about masks, instead of mocking reporters about masks, instead of accusing people of being politically correct, instead of sending his chief of staff to Capitol Hill to look at reporters wearing masks going, 'You sure do look funny in masks,' or whatever he said."
"Once in awhile, he doesn't say something that makes the lives of senior citizens and diabetics and people with asthma hang in the balance," he added. "Once in a while, he doesn't say something that encourages Americans to abuse store clerks for wearing masks, to abuse people in grocery stores who take care of you, who work for minimum wage, who put their lives on the line every day because they have families to take care of, and they've got people screaming at them, people abusing them, people getting in their face and screaming. People going to racks with masks and dumping them on the floor because they think that Americans have fought and died for over 240 years so they could have the constitutional right to kill senior citizens, to kill diabetics, to kill people with asthma, to kill their family members and to kill others by not wearing masks."
Trump did not deserve credit for pivoting toward a policy he should have pursued six months ago, the host said.
"This really wasn't Vietnam, this is much easier this was like -- and I'm not being sarcastic here -- do what Joe Biden told you to do at the end of January," Scarborough said. "Let the doctors and let the scientists run this show, and instead, here we are -- 142,000 dead, after two and a half Vietnams."
"You don't get credit for that, you don't get credit for letting over 100,000 senior citizens die," he added. "You don't get credit for ignoring this virus time and time again. you don't get credit for being, I don't know, I think probably more wrong than any president in the history of the United States has ever been, with more calamitous results. No credit. Sorry. Just stop, just go home. You've already killed enough Americans."