Sunday, April 19, 2020

Speaker Pelosi rips Trump as ‘weak leader,’ tells ‘Fox News Sunday’ he’s failed on coronavirus response



House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gave President Trump an ‘F’ for what she called “weak” leadership during the coronavirus pandemic and promised that despite recent snags, Congress will "soon" reach an agreement for adding $250 billion to replenish a program that provides forgivable loans to small businesses.
Pelosi, in her first “Fox News Sunday” interview since 2017, accused Trump of ignoring scientific evidence in formulating a plan for the nation to recover from the pandemic that has shut down most of the economy.
“Leaders -- leaders take responsibility. So I said he’s a weak leader. He doesn’t take responsibility. He places blame -- blame on others,” Pelosi said. “And that might have been OK before, but we cannot continue down a path that is, again I’ll come back to science, science, science, evidence, data on how we should go forward.”
Trump announced his plan last week, and Pelosi remained critical of the president even though Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the plan’s first phase, if carried out properly, could provide enough testing for it to work.
When asked if she believes Fauci, Pelosi said she does, but pointed to what she called a “failure” to perform sufficient testing thus far as evidence that the administration has already come up short.
“But we’re way late on it and that is a failure. The president gets an F, a failure on the testing,” Pelosi said. “But Fauci -- Dr. Fauci’s right. If it is done properly, it hasn’t been and I -- I think when he puts in the ‘if it’s done’ is an admission that it hasn’t been done.”

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