Bolton said that the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 186,000 Americans, underscores the risk of Trump’s thought process.
“I think one of the major difficulties Donald Trump has as president is he doesn’t think strategically, he doesn’t have a philosophy, he doesn’t think along policy terms and he certainly doesn’t think strategically,” Bolton said.
“And the handling of the coronavirus pandemic tragically has reflected the utter lack of strategy beginning in January and continuing right through until today in September,” Bolton said. “And I think it’s made it much worse than it could have been and could foreshadow even more damage.”
A new forecast from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington predicts that U.S. deaths from Covid-19 will top 400,000 by end of the year.
Bolton said that the president earlier this year “at first didn’t want to hear about a virus coming from China, about “a pandemic could harm the economy in the US, which he saw as his ticket to reelection.”
Bolton added, “So I think we lost a lot of time at the beginning. I think we then overreacted in some cases under reacted and others, all of which shows thinking that’s far from strategic.”
The White House had no comment about Bolton’s remarks.
But Trump himself boasted of his response to the Covid-19 crisis in comments to reporters Friday.
“The numbers are way down,” Trump said, referring to coronavirus infection and mortality rates, after saying that a vaccine would be coming soon.
“We’re very proud of the job we’re doing,” he said.
Article source: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/04/john-bolton-criticizes-trump-on-coronavirus-response.html