Ayanna Pressley: Donald Trump Operated with 'Willful Criminality' About the Deadliness of Coronavirus
Saturday during an appearance on MSNBC’s “PoliticsNation,” Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) accused President Donald Trump of acting criminally with his response to the COVID-19.
She first criticized the Republican-led U.S. Senate in her rant about Capitol Hill’s inability to reach a deal on coronavirus relief.
“Reverend Sharpton, this Democratic majority House has moved multiple bipartisan relief bills to truly meet the scale and scope and to acknowledge the gravity of the hurt that Americans are experiencing every day,” Pressley said. “Unprecedented unemployment, food insecurity, we find ourselves on the precipice of an eviction tsunami, small businesses whose doors will be permanently shuttered. There is no national testing strategy. And so we have moved bipartisan relief packages to meet the scale and scope of this pandemic, to provide the emergency aid for schools to safely reopen, to invest in contact tracing, of which I have colleagues across the aisle who don’t even believe in the merits of contact tracing and also to provide the emergency aid to preserve the United States Postal Service, which is a public good and an essential good.”
“So the GOP Senate may not want to do their job, but we’re not going to abdicate our responsibility to lead in this moment, to continue to fight to meet the scale and scope of this crisis, to fight for rent cancellation, mortgage cancellation, eviction and foreclosure moratoriums, the cancellation of student debt, extended unemployment benefits, and to address food insecurity, and again to fight for those resources to safely reopen our schools eventually,” she continued. “But in the meantime, we have to get this pandemic under control and it is stunning, I thought that this administration was operating with complete incompetence in their sluggish response and science denials and criminal negligence, but in fact, it was willful.”
Pressley went on to name President Donald Trump as part of the “criminality” of the COVID-19 response.
Cowardness and callousness. They are simply carrying the water for Donald Trump in this administration. When it comes to their policies, the cruelty is the point and time and time again, when it comes to their culture, the callousness and the corruption is the point. They have politicized this pandemic. And again, we shudder to think if the projections that have been offered and the American lives that we could have saved if Donald Trump had not operated with willful criminality about the deadliness of this virus.
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