Donald Trump must resign the presidency due to his failure to properly respond to the coronavirus, MSNBC host Chris Hayes said on Friday.
In a segment on his Friday evening program, Hayes said that Trump has carried out “one of the worst governing failures in American history” and possibly the worst overall since the Civil War. He called the president’s handling of the coronavirus “bungled” and said that no other country has had such a poor response.
The segment came amid a national rise in coronavirus cases, led by a number of hotspots where Trump-supporting governors pushed to reopen states before public health experts said it was safe to do so. That includes both Florida and Texas, where cases have risen significantly, even as other previous hotspots — including New York and New Jersey — have been on the decline. The United States has hit all-time highs in new daily cases as a result of this resurgence.
Trump has been criticized for failing to properly address the spread of the virus, including spending weeks at the onset of the outbreak downplaying its severity and predicting that the cases would soon go down to zero. He has since come under fire for what critics see as an inadequate system of testing. He was further criticized for his remarks at a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma last week, where he said he asked his administration to slow down testing because it was revealing too many positive cases.
Hayes said that Trump’s presidency has been “terrible” from the start, citing the president’s approach to immigration and separation of children from their families at the U.S. border and what the host saw as bigoted statements and actions. But he was especially harsh with Trump’s handling of the coronavirus , noting that countries taking the outbreak seriously and adopting strict lockdown measures are now returning to normal.
“We are suffering through the incompetence of a man who took a huge inheritance and squandered it on stupid glitzy investments and bankrupted his company six times because he was not up to the task,” Hayes said. “If this presidency had creditors, the virus’ resurgence this week would have been a default event. Only it is not his creditors who are suffering. It is us. It is the people who could have survived this virus. It is friends and loved ones in nursing homes, and the people on the front lines, and the ones working in meat packing plants, and the ones serving time in prison.”