President Donald Trump lauds the response from the United States to the coronavirus pandemic, given the nation with the highest reported number of cases and the highest death toll in the world. During his Republican National Convention remarks Thursday, Trump said that if his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, had been in office during the pandemic, “hundreds of thousands of more Americans” would have died. Under Trump’s watch 180,000 Americans have already died of coronavirus.
In 2018, the Trump administration agreed to dismantle the White House directorate of the National Security Council tasked with planning for a pandemic to strike the country. Former officials of the Obama administration said the Trump White House would have been able to move sooner if the office were still active to avoid the spread of coronavirus.
Trump also tried to say that he would keep China “completely responsible for the catastrophe they caused,” unlike Biden. But early on in the pandemic, he praised China for its openness and claimed they were working hard to contain the virus.
