Barack Obama said his successor Donald Trump’s handling of the new coronavirus pandemic was “an utter chaotic disaster,” US media reported on Saturday.
This scathing criticism, the most explicit to date from his part, the former Democratic president made it Friday evening during a half-hour telephone conversation with former collaborators of his government, including Yahoo News obtained a recording.
Donald Trump accused of downplaying the threat
Barack Obama invokes in particular the response to the health crisis to justify the need to choose good leaders and call on his ex-advisers to invest in the campaign of Joe Biden, his former vice-president and democratic candidate for the presidential election of November facing Donald Trump.
“The coming election, at all levels, is so important because we will not only face an individual or a political party,” he said, according to what he reported in several media. He believes that the real adversary are “long-term trends” like “being tribal, being divided, seeing others as enemies”, which are likely to characterize “American life”.
Still very popular with Democrats, Barack Obama had already hinted that the Republican billionaire had “dismissed the warnings” about the risks of a pandemic. Donald Trump is accused by his critics of having first minimized the threat, then of having given contradictory and confused instructions, between the calls for caution and the haste to see the economy recover.
Former president says he wants to “campaign as intensively as possible for Joe Biden”
In Friday’s conversation, the first black president of the United States (2009-2017) also reversed the controversial decision of the United States Department of Justice to drop the charges against Michael Flynn, a former Donald Trump advisor prosecuted for lying about his contacts with a Russian diplomat.
“There is no precedent that can be found for a person charged with perjury who gets away with it,” he said. “This is the kind of situation where we can begin to fear that (…) our basic reading of the rule of law will be threatened,” he warned.
“When we take this path, it can go very quickly, as we have seen elsewhere,” he added, calling on not to underestimate this event.
There too, he underlines to see there a reason to support his former vice-president. “This is why I will spend as much time as necessary campaigning as intensively as possible for Joe Biden“, he assured.
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