The Biden campaign early Wednesday pushed back on the GOP convention’s rosy view of the COVID-19 pandemic, which killed more than 1,100 people in the United States on Tuesday alone.
In a three-minute pre-taped revisionist history lesson, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow repeatedly referred to the coronavirus pandemic in the past tense, suggesting it was a once-in-a-century hurtle that the country has already surmounted.
“It was awful,” Kudlow said, of the COVID-19 crisis that has killed more than 178,000 people in the United States and continues to kill more than 1,000 people per day as it did for five straight days last week. “Health and economic impacts were tragic. Hardship and heartbreak were everywhere,” he said.
“But presidential leadership came swiftly and effectively with an extraordinary rescue for health and safety to successfully fight the COVID virus.”
Kudlow is not unfamiliar with the kind of head-in-sand oblivion that he spewed on Tuesday. He had also famously asserted in late February that the coronavirus pandemic had been contained “pretty close to airtight,” and months later defended those claims to CNN anchor Jake Tapper in May, suggesting — as the coronavirus tore across the United States — that his winter remarks had been factual at the time.
Communications director for the Biden campaign, Kate Bedingfield, pushed back on what she called an the RNC’s “delusion” amid months of “utter mismanagement” of the pandemic by Trump in a statement issued Wednesday.
“President Trump’s RNC is an alternate reality,” Bedingfield said. “In this delusion, thousands of Americans didn’t die in the last week from COVID-19, nor have millions of Americans been infected or put out of work.”
The Biden campaign official rebuked Republicans for putting forward no clear plan for beating back the pandemic in the convention’s first two nights.
“Donald Trump’s continual refusal to take this virus seriously has given the United States the worst outbreak in the world,” Bedingfield said in the statement.
“His convention’s refusal to come to grips with reality or acknowledge the magnitude of the loss is a stark reminder to Americans of his complete failure to lead,” she added.
