Joe Biden has been politicizing the deaths of Americans from COVID for months, and today, when the official tally passed 200,000 American deaths, Biden pounced on the news.
“Trump panicked. The virus was too big for him,” Biden claimed without evidence. “He just wasn’t up to it. He froze, he failed to act, he panicked. And America has paid the worst price of any nation in the world.”
This is, of course, not true. Not only did the Trump administration respond early and aggressively, but America has not “paid the worst price of any nation in the world” in deaths per capita.
For sure, 200,000+ deaths is tragic, but that doesn’t mean Joe Biden gets to be Monday morning quarterback and say that “If Trump had done this, it wouldn’t have been this bad,” when Biden himself wasn’t calling for such actions to be done before Trump had. In fact, Biden repeatedly called for Trump to do things he’d already done. sometimes weeks prior.
Blaming Trump for a disease that came from China is politicization at its ugliest. President Trump has listened to the experts and done what was necessary. The one time he didn’t listen to the experts was when he implemented the travel ban with China in January, which, experts now agree, saved thousands of lives.
Oh, and Joe Biden opposed that travel ban, only to flip-flop on his position two months later.
Without a doubt, the death toll from COVID-19 is lower than it could have been because of Trump’s leadership.
There’s nothing to gloat about in Joe Biden’s leadership ability. In addition to flip-flopping on multiple COVID-19 issues, his incompetence as vice president still has a higher death toll than the pandemic.
In 2009, the Obama-Biden administration promised to end the horrendous backlog in VA benefits claims, some of which had languished for years. But instead, under their leadership, the backlog skyrocketed. Unprocessed claims exceeded 900,000. Roughly two-thirds of all claims idled for 125 days or longer. From 2011 to 2013, the time it took to process claims increased 40 percent, to a devastatingly long 272 days.
And the Obama-Biden administration did nothing, even as this backlog surge resulted in the number of veterans dying waiting for care and benefits skyrocketing.
After reports of vets dying while waiting for care started getting attention, the Obama-Biden administration tried to cover up the full extent of the scandal, and courageous whistleblowers found themselves targeted by the administration for retaliation. In fact, according to the independent Office of Special Counsel, complaints of retaliation against whistleblowers were filed in 28 states at 45 facilities. The Obama-Biden administration cared more about the public relations disaster than the lives of our nation’s heroes.
According to an Inspector General report released in September 2015, more than 300,000 veterans died while waiting for care from Obama and Biden’s Department of Veterans Affairs. The problems at the VA were fixable and they failed to fix them.
Trump is not to blame for the 200,000 lives lost because of COVID-19—China is. But Barack Obama and Joe Biden are responsible for the 300,000 veterans who died because of their incompetence.
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Matt Margolis is the author of the new book Airborne: How The Liberal Media Weaponized The Coronavirus Against Donald Trump, and the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattMargolis
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