MSNBC host Rachel Maddow appealed directly to Donald Trump's ego on Friday night in an effort to get him to put someone in place who's qualified to lead the national battle against the coronavirus.
Said Maddow: “We have the worst coronavirus outbreak in the world. We've already got more than 7,000 dead Americans. We don't have a treatment. We don't have a vaccine. We don't have a cure. We don't really even have testing in this country on any widespread basis. The only thing we've got to try to stop this virus is to keep people from giving it to each other. It is insane that we have no federal policy in this regard.”
“Mr. President, there are things that only you can do here,” she pleaded. “But the most important thing that you can do is put somebody in charge. You know, you'll love it, because whoever you pick, you can blame that person at the end when there are still 100,000 or 200,000 dead Americans piled up in the nation's funeral homes and crematoriums and cemeteries. Pick somebody you're looking forward to scapegoating and blaming and saying that it was all their fault from the beginning. I think that we could take that as a country, if putting somebody in charge, who is actually in charge, might also mean that we'll keep the numbers that low. Because as long as we don't have a federal response that is being run by anyone, there's no guarantee that the numbers will stay within that massive range that you're talking about. The sky is the limit in terms of what it could be.”
Maddow urged Trump to look at what George W. Bush did belatedly with the Katrina response in appointing US Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honore.
“You may want to get your son-in-law out of the way here,” she add, referring to Jared Kushner, who appears to have no comprehension of the crisis which doesn't revolve around personal or political greed.
Added Maddow: “You're going to need to well and truly let an experienced operations manager take the lead and fix this now. It is too late already, but now is better than never. Now is better than next week. Yesterday would have been better than today. But we'll take what we can get. We can't call it too late. We have to believe that we can still course-correct to save some lives. Just do it already. Whatever you need to tell yourself to do it, just do it.”
