Of all the idiotic excuses used to defend Donald Trump's botched handling of COVID-19, the Senate Majority Leader said the federal government didn't pay enough attention to the coronavirus because of Trump's impeachment trial.
While being interviewed by Hugh Hewitt, McConnell said:
And it came up while we were tied down in the impeachment trial,” he added. “And I think it diverted the attention of the government, because everything every day was all about impeachment.
Wow, so Mitch McConnell just admitted, whether it's true or not, that the slow response by the federal government to the COVID-19 was due to Trump's own criminality. Remember, he was IMPEACHED. Apparently Trump's federal government can't chew gum and walk at the same time.
This is really a ridiculous excuse (as more people are dying in New York as you read this post) because the Senate trial started on January 16, 2020, and ended on February 5. Furthermore, Trump wasn't removed from office because Republicans held the majority in the Senate. Period. Full stop.
If Hewitt was not playing the fool Trump apologist, he would have asked what happened to the federal government between February 6 and the March 11 Oval Office address to the nation. What was the entire federal government doing for five weeks? What was the Department of Health and Human Services doing? Why weren't members of Trump's cabinet holding meetings with the medical professionals and the CDC?
It's been a big problem that Trump has refused to fill many jobs throughout the federal government, and leadership positions have mostly been filled by ACTING members of his cabinet, so WTF happened?
During a February 28th Trump re-election rally in South Carolina, Trump crowed, “Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus! They have no clue, they can't even count their votes in Iowa...This is their new hoax!”
For five weeks Trump called it a "democratic hoax" led by the media to continue impeaching him, while the world screamed that COVID-19 was a serious health issue for the world. It took Trump until the March 11 Oval Office address for him to agree with the WHO, and to finally call it a pandemic. But his remarks were so scattershot, off-the-cuff, incoherent, and poorly thought-out that Trump crashed the stock market.
Meanwhile, according to Trump Golf Count, he's played golf eleven times since January 1. — eight of those times during impeachment! It's apparent Trump's golfing, and not his woes about being impeached and thrown out of office, were more important than the health of the nation.
Others have responded like I have.
Mitch McConnell just blamed Trump’s COVID-19 failures on impeachment.
That’s wrong—dead wrong.
In fact, the opposite is true: impeachment warned McConnell & other Americans about exactly how Trump would screw this up.
I laid this out in @PostEverything: https://t.co/JmuZrPf9IY— Joshua A. Geltzer (@jgeltzer) March 31, 2020
I remember when McCain suspended his campaign because of the financial crisis.
Obama's response: "I think it is going to be part of the president's job to be able to deal with more than one thing at once." (1/2) https://t.co/wohuhR4tB4— Josh Chafetz (@joshchafetz) March 31, 2020
A source at a conservative firm doing Trump/RNC work tells me the Message of the Day is "Impeachment kept Trump from focusing on the virus."
This person and I went from great friends (2000s to 2016) then frenemies (2017-2019) and now this person is PISSED.
More to follow.— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) March 31, 2020
Trump was acquitted by the Senate on February 5—but didn’t declare a national emergency to address #COVID19 until March 13.
Even accepting this nonsense argument (Presidents can’t do two things at once??), that’s *37 days* after acquittal without any meaningful federal action. https://t.co/OLm0LJwMLs— Steve Vladeck (@steve_vladeck) March 31, 2020
