Donald Trump Is Turning America Into A ‘Perverse Hunger Games,’ Cory Booker Says
New Jersey Sen. and former Democratic presidential candidate Cory Booker appeared on Friday’s episode of The View and attacked Donald Trump‘s leadership amid the coronavirus pandemic. As reported by Breitbart, Booker stressed the importance of listening to scientists and medical professionals and pointed to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which experienced a second wave that was much worse than the first.
“We have got to do this right,” he said.
The 51-year-old Democratic lawmaker then expressed his frustration with people who use “militaristic terms” to describe the United States amid the pandemic.
“This is a war. I’ve heard people say that. If that’s the case, what we should be doing is not having this kind of perverse Hunger Games where you have literally governors competing against each other for the critical resources they need. We didn’t do that in World War II. We had a national mobilization to meet the threat to our nation.”
As reported by Fox News, the dystopian Hunger Games brand includes a movie and book series that depicts a world in which a ruling class forces randomly selected competitors in the population to fight to the death for their entertainment.
Booker said Trump’s White House has exhibited a “failure of leadership” and suggested he wants to “trigger partisan animosity” to help his chances in November. He also pushed back on Trump’s attempt to place the onus of dealing with COVID-19 on individual states.
“No. We’re the United States of America,” he said before calling on Trump to utilize the Defense Production Act (DPA) to replenish the country’s supply of personal protective equipment (PPE).
As Fox News noted, Trump recently utilized Title III of the DPA to force private companies to create PPE. But according to Vox, many believe the two times the president has invoked Title III — once for N95 masks and once for testing swabs — is insufficient.
A recent letter penned by nine Democratic Senators urges Trump to increase PPE and testing supplies using Title III, and claims that American’s widespread shortages of critical medical supplies show no end in sight. According to the senators, private sector companies have been “reticent to expand production capacity” without guidance from the federal government and need a push from Trump’s administration.
Amid PPE shortages, Trump again raised the projected death toll for coronavirus in America. As The Inquisitr reported, the president now predicts that up to 110,000 people could die from the virus — a significant increase from the 50,000 to 60,000 projected in April.
