President Donald Trump is "playing out an election strategy" through his actions during the coronavirus crisis rather than acting as a leader, former Secretary of State John Kerry said Wednesday.
"He’s more focused on getting the economy moving before all the experts say, 'you ought to be putting people back together in close quarters again,' and without the adequate rules by which people will be required to behave, and certainly, without the adequate testing that other countries are doing," Kerry said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe."
Most countries, he added, are doing better than the United States is on testing, and without that, the economy cannot get back to a "real normal."
"You're not going to fill restaurants, and you’re not going to get people out there when the medical experts are saying, you know, it’s not safe to do it yet," said Kerry. The president is not heeding that."
Instead, the president is attacking governors and members of the media, said Kerry, and he's "never seen any president, Republican or Democrat alike, behave like that. It may be entertaining as a reality show, but it has no relationship whatsoever to presidential leadership."
Kerry also Wednesday referred to the pandemic as America's "moment of truth," as "a lot of us were depairing that we were losing the capacity to decide in our country, in our democracy, what the baseline of truth is."
Now, there is a war on scientists and facts, he said.
"It's a willingness to completely distort the truth in favor of an ideology or personal election pursuit or whatever," said Kerry. "Coronavirus may be to America, the world's great wake-up call with respect to the challenge of climate because this is coming at us. If you think pandemics are bad today, wait till you have the warming at a greater level than it is now."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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