‘President Trump has demonstrated that he’s incapable of leading the country during a crisis, and his inaction has cost lives…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) After President Donald Trump’s February acquittal over bogus impeachment charges of abuse of office and contempt of Congress, his subsequent approval bump was enough to make Democrats scramble to change the subject.
But in the midst of a new national health crisis, one partisan-leftist congresswoman tested the revisionist waters Wednesday, insisting Trump should have been convicted—not for any high crimes or misdemeanors, but on the basis of his future response to the coronavirus pandemic.
“I’m getting to the age where I don’t have time to mince words: If the Senate had removed President Trump in January, I believe our country’s response would have been swifter, more competent, and would have saved lives,” claimed Rep. Alma Adams, D-NC, according to the News & Observer.
“President Trump has demonstrated that he’s incapable of leading the country during a crisis, and his inaction has cost lives,” continued the 73-year-old radical.
The impeachment trial, which ended in February after consuming much of the nation’s attention in the months leading up, likely cost government officials precious response time in preparing for the pandemic.
The first US cases were reported in late January. Federal officials, including Trump, were briefed on the severity of the crisis not long after.
On Jan. 31, Trump assembled top health advisers in the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force to work on a coordinated response, with Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar directly overseeing the efforts.
The failures of bureaucratic agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to effectively mobilize during the month of February prompted Trump to designate Vice President Mike Pence to oversee the task force as the concerns over the virus quickly escalated.
Had Pence been in the process of transitioning to the Oval Office following Trump’s theoretical removal, however, it is not clear that his response to the virus would have been sooner or more effective.
WHO’s Really Responsible?
Alma, conveniently, let herself and fellow legislators off the hook.
“I don’t know if Congress could have done more—you’ve seen a swift, bipartisan response that’s moved faster than the usual speed of Congress,” she said.
“Perhaps we could have used the power of the purse to procure PPEs (personal protective equipment),” she conceded.
Both the Obama administration and the state governments in “blue” localities most heavily impacted by the virus, including New York and California, have faced scrutiny for depleting crucial stockpiles of medical equipment, such as face masks, and ignoring government audits that alerted to a critical shortage of ventilators.
To Adams’ credit, she was urging officials to prepare for the worst as early as Jan. 30, when she co-signed a letter to Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia requesting a review of the occupational-hazard standards for healthcare workers.
“While it is currently too early to determine the virulence of 2019-nCoV or the rate of transmission, there is a high potential for it to become a grave danger to health care workers,” said the letter. “If 2019-nCoV proves to be highly communicable, virulent, and easily transmissible in a health care setting, OSHA will need to take immediate and decisive action.”
But Rep. Ted Budd, R-NC, a Trump ally in a district adjacent to Adams, noted that China had sought early on to mislead about the impact of the virus.
Mecklenburg County has 444 cases of COVID-19, which would have been preventable had China not lied, and the first reaction is to take political cheap shots. That’s not helping anybody. https://t.co/fSoVVsE3zX
— Ted Budd (@RepTedBudd) April 1, 2020
Lawmakers including Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., also have called for the UN’s World Health Organization to be held accountable for its complicity in the Chinese disinformation campaign.
Although many serious news outlets—have acknowledged China’s cover-up efforts, some left-wing media continue to mislead, allowing China to spread propaganda.
Meanwhile, Chinese citizens have contradicted the official accounts that there are no new cases, citing long hospital lines and round-the-clock incinerators.
Early Efforts Unheeded
Trump was both skeptical and cautiously optimistic of the outcome until mid-March, when he declared a national emergency.
Seeking to reassure the public at a March 3 rally in Adams’s home district of Charlotte, Trump said he had recently convened the heads of pharmaceutical companies to start working on a potential vaccine.
“They’re gonna have vaccines, I think, relatively soon,” he said. “… We will bring these therapies to the market as rapidly as possible.”
Despite the gauntlet of regulatory hurdles that stand in the way, companies including Moderna are projecting to have a vaccine on the market by fall.
Additionally, Trump—who announced in early February, during a pre-game Super Bowl interview, that he had shut down travel from China—continued to call for tighter border restrictions.
“There are fringe globalists who would rather keep our borders open than keep the infection [out],” Trump said at the March 3 rally.
But that action was rebuffed by hard-line liberals like New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, whose city has since become the new epicenter for the US health crisis.
Trump also called for unity in response to the crisis.
“The political attacks—some of the Democrats really must stop,” he said at the rally. “We’ve gotta all work together on this one to save our people.”
Alma, however, took every opportunity to snipe at the president over his efforts to stave off a mass panic.
“I think the president should have and could have moved a lot more swiftly on this issue,” she claimed on March 10, the same day that the WHO declared a global pandemic, causing the previously bullish US economy to tank.
“He should have taken it more seriously,” Adams continued. “I think he just tried to shrug it off and did not want to really admit that we have a crisis.”
In the wake of her more recent comments, Adams doubled down on Twitter, twice retweeting the statement while adding, “I said what I said.“
