Former national security adviser Susan Rice said President Donald Trump uses former President Barack Obama as a scapegoat for his administration’s problems because he is insecure.
"I can only assume and infer that President Trump has some extraordinary insecurity in relation to Barack Obama,” Rice told CNN’s Don Lemon on Wednesday night. "Everything that Obama stood for; decency, family values, unity, a country that stood tall and proud, not by dividing but by uniting, is the antithesis of who Donald Trump is. And he’s clearly threatened by it and he clearly likes to use Obama as a foil for all of his failures.”
She rebuts Trump’s claims that the Obama administration failed to prepare the U.S. for the coronavirus pandemic.
“He keeps repeating these lies and they are all designed to distract and deflect from his own administration’s failures,” she said.
Claims that the Obama administration left the national strategic stockpile empty are not true, she said.
“Independent journalists who visited the national strategic stockpile in late 2016 validated that it was indeed fully stocked,” she said.
And as for not having enough test kits she said, “You can’t create a test for a virus that doesn’t exist.”
She said the Obama administration left a 69-page “Pandemic for Dummies” playbook that outlined what steps to take in the event of a pandemic.
She said the Obama administration not only left instructions, but warned a pandemic would happen at some point. She said she even created an office in the White House to deal with a pandemic.
She said the Trump administration was caught “flat-footed” by the pandemic because they were “not focused on the reality a pandemic was going to happen sometime.”
“So they deflected and delayed and didn’t take the months of January and February to prepare as they must,” Rice said. “We have lost thousands of lives, and our economy is far worse off than it had otherwise been, had they been on this from day one.”
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