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  • 2020-05-01 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Trump Blame Obama for 'Bad' COVID-19 Tests? (en)
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  • On April 30, 2020, social media users and news outlets noted that U.S. President Donald Trump had blamed his predecessor former President Barack Obama for leaving the Trump administration with faulty COVID-19 diagnostic tests, even though the ongoing coronavirus disease pandemic is the result of a virus not discovered until 2019. At the time the new coronavirus was first detected in the winter of 2019, Obama had been out of office for just under three years. The timeline prompted some to ask whether Trump had really blamed Obama for leaving him faulty tests for a disease that did not yet exist. After COVID-19 was first detected in the U.S., something of a scandal broke out surrounding the failure to provide and coordinate widespread testing for the virus. This failure was the result of, as The New York Times reported, technical flaws, regulatory hurdles, business-as-usual bureaucracies and lack of leadership at multiple levels. Notably, diagnostic tests first sent out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were flawed. Fast forward to the end of April. During a White House meeting between Trump and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, CNN Reporter Jim Acosta asked Trump, Is it fair for the voters to take into consideration your handling of the pandemic when they assess whether to reelect you in the fall? Trump responded to this question with a mixture of praise for the response of his own administration and blame for the previous administration for failures, something he has done before. According to a White House transcript of the exchange, here is what Trump stated in regards to faulty tests: Because Trump stated that the previous administration had left us with nothing, then immediately stated his own administration started off with bad, broken tests and obsolete tests during a discussion of the Trump administration's handling of COVID-19, we rate the claim that Trump implied the Obama administration was to blame for leaving behind faulty COVID-19 tests as True. As of this writing, the CDC tallies more than 1,031,659 COVID-19 cases in the U.S. and 60,057 deaths from the disease. (en)
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