Susan Rice, a national security adviser during the Obama administration, blames President Donald Trump for American coronavirus deaths.

Speaking to the Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehardt on his “Cape Up” podcast, Rice said that the president’s reaction to the coronavirus outbreak had cost thousands of Americans their lives. “He has demonstrated utter lack of leadership, utter incompetence. And he’s been profoundly dishonest about the nature of the threat to the American people by downplaying it, by dismissing it, by comparing it to the flu,” Rice told Capehardt.

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“He has misled the American people to such an extent that lives have been lost in the process. Whether that’s because he didn’t care or he was trying to downplay the problem and buoy his electoral prospects mistakenly, or whether it was to buck up the markets, or because he doesn’t care, I don’t know what it was,” Rice continued, claiming his actions have “cost tens of thousands of American lives.”

Rice alleged that the Trump administration “was not interested in pandemics” and “was not prepared for pandemics,” but that the Obama administration had made pandemics “a top national security priority.” She argued that the administration should have moved “immediately from very early January to do the things that we know we have to do.”

This is, unsurprisingly, all completely false. Firstly, the Obama administration actually contributed to making the coronavirus outbreak worse by depleting the stores of N95 masks and never refilling them.

As The Political Insider reported last month, after 100 million masks were used in the H1N1 outbreak in 2009, the Obama administration was strongly recommended to replete the masks, but the advice was not heeded. Charles Johnson, president of the International Safety Equipment Association, said that “our association is unaware of any major effort to restore the stockpile to cover that drawdown.”

The outbreak “caused a 2- to 3-year backlog orders for the N95 variety,” Bloomberg News noted, adding that “the stockpile distributed about three-quarters of its inventory and didn’t build back the supply.”

President Trump clearly did act in January. Rice and the liberal media pundits forget that President Trump ordered a complete shutdown of flights from China, while at the time they called this action racist and deplored it. Tedros Adhanom, the director-general of the World Health Organization, called the move “not evidence based,” but travel bans absolutely work. Rice, like many others on the Left, will use this to attack the president, no matter the truth.

This piece originally appeared in ThePoliticalInsider.com and is used by permission.

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