Hillary Clinton: 'I Would Have Done a Better Job' than Trump on Coronavirus
Failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton stated in an interview published Friday that she would have done a “better job” than President Trump in response to the Chinese coronavirus pandemic.
“We wouldn’t have been able to stop the pandemic at our borders the way that Trump claimed in the beginning, but we sure could have done a better job saving lives, modeling better, more responsible behavior,” Clinton told the Hollywood Reporter when asked if she would have handled the “current moment of crisis” better than President Trump.
“I don’t think we necessarily should have had as deep an economic assault on livelihoods and jobs as we have. So I know I would have done a better job,” she continued without providing further detail on how she would have, specifically, better responded to the virus as Commander-in-Chief and lessened the “economic assault.”
Despite Clinton’s implication, the president took decisive action at the start of the pandemic, restricting entry into the U.S. of travelers from China, as the New York Timesreported on January 31:
Moving to counter the spreading coronavirus outbreak, the Trump administration said Friday that it would bar entry by most foreign nationals who had recently visited China and put some American travelers under a quarantine as it declared a rare public health emergency.
In March, Trump suspended travel from the European Union, followed by the closure of the northern and southern U.S. borders to non-essential travel to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus.
Trump allowed governors to decide how to handle the outbreak state-by-state, as most effectively shut down, leading to a virtual economic standstill and millions of jobs lost. His administration assembled a Coronavirus Task Force, holding daily briefings as Congress passed the $2 trillion CARES Act, providing economic relief to families and businesses through forgivable loans and $1,200 stimulus checks.
Trump also refused to ignore the role the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) purportedly played in working with China to cover up the severity of the outbreak, halting funding to the W.H.O. in April and announcing the termination of the United States’ relationship with the organization in May.
As Breitbart News reported:
Trump said that the WHO failed to act on reforms that the United States had demanded, prompting his decision to end America’s role with the organization.
“We have detailed the reforms that it must make and engage with them directly, but they have refused to act,” he said.
Trump said that the United States would use the hundreds of millions previously sent to the WHO to other international aid programs.
Vice President Mike Pence on Thursday spoke about the administration’s efforts to ensure an abundance of PPE in the country and said that the U.S. is “well on our way to manufacturing 100,000 ventilators in 100 days.”
“And in just a matter of the next two weeks, we’ll have 50,000 ventilators in the Strategic National Stockpile,” he said.
Clinton has remained a vocal critic of the president throughout the pandemic. She devoted some of her critiques to Trump describing the virus — which originated in Wuhan, China — as the “Chinese virus,” branding it “racist rhetoric,” despite the fact that countless establishment media outlets also referred to it as the “Chinese Coronavirus,” “Chinese Virus,” “Wuhan Virus,” and “Wuhan Coronavirus”:
The president is turning to racist rhetoric to distract from his failures to take the coronavirus seriously early on, make tests widely available, and adequately prepare the country for a period of crisis.
Don't fall for it. Don't let your friends and family fall for it.
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) March 18, 2020
Like many of her progressive counterparts, Clinton has also used the pandemic to push vote-by-mail, even though recent data has failed to show a compelling public health justification for method, as seen in Wisconsin’s April 7 primary.
Nonetheless, Clinton also criticized Trump for holding a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, last month during the pandemic, but she has yet to sharply criticize the throngs of protesters continually taking to the streets in the coronavirus-era.