GOP Governor Takes Trump to Task Over COVID

Maryland's Larry Hogan lays into president in op-ed
By Newser Editors,  Newser Staff
Posted Jul 16, 2020 3:45 PM CDT
GOP Governor Takes Trump to Task Over COVID
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan.   (AP Photo/Brian Witte, file)

A new op-ed makes the case that President Trump's administration "bungled" the coronavirus response so badly that it left states vulnerable to the disease. The sentiment is a familiar one among Trump's critics on the left, but in this case it comes from a Republican governor. Maryland's Larry Hogan makes his case in the Washington Post, focusing in particular on the failure of the federal government to get its act together on testing. "Eventually, it was clear that waiting around for the president to run the nation’s response was hopeless," he writes. "If we delayed any longer, we’d be condemning more of our citizens to suffering and death." In Hogan's case, that led to his unusual decision to acquire test kits from South Korea, his wife's native country.

"Meanwhile, instead of listening to his own public health experts, the president was talking and tweeting like a man more concerned about boosting the stock market or his reelection plans," writes Hogan, chair of the National Governors Association. He says the contrast between White House dismissals of the virus and "dire" warnings that governors received from public health officials was "jarring." Hogan recounts Trump's statements about the virus going back to January and accuses him of downplaying its severity every step of the way. “So many nationwide actions could have been taken in those early days but weren’t,” Hogan writes. “While other countries were racing ahead with well-coordinated testing regimes, the Trump administration bungled the effort.” (Read the full op-ed.)

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