Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters (CA) said on Saturday that President Donald Trump was responsible for the deaths of Americans who did not wear a face covering and tested positive for coronavirus.

“The federal government should come to the aid of the states and the cities and do everything that we can to assist these families to make sure that there is food on the table, to make sure that our small businesses can remain a business after this pandemic,” Waters told MSNBC.

“So I think that the federal government should be a government that the people can rely on,” the Democrat added. “This president has absolutely failed in his responsibility to ensure that everything was being done to assist our families.”

Waters then criticized Trump for promoting hydroxychloroquine as a possible cure or treatment for COVID-19.

“First of all the president rolled out it is a hoax, and then he secondly rolled out that it is going to disappear, and then he said, you know, hydroxychloroquine would be the answer, but it wasn’t,” she said.

“So all of those who followed him, it took all of this time to come around to say that masks were important and should be worn,” Waters said. “I will tell you that a lot of people were not wearing the masks because their president didn’t wear them and told them that it didn’t make any difference and are probably dead now, and he is responsible for it.”

She said the same thing in June, tweeting, “Trump still refuses to wear a mask. Trump’s FAILED leadership & his unfortunate followers not wearing masks & not social distancing is responsible for the growing infections, death, & surge in #coronavirus cases.”

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Waters also made a similar point about coronavirus and deaths in the wake of the death of former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain last week.

She said that Cain “happened to have been at the rally in Tulsa on June 20th with no mask on, with a group of people around him with no mask on, and he’s dead. He died.”

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

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