Ex-GOP Lawmaker Spots The Coronavirus Moment Donald Trump Will Come To Regret

Lee Moran
Updated ·2 min read

Former Rep. David Jolly (R-Fla.) predicted the moment that may come to define President Donald Trump’s haphazard and widely criticized response to the coronavirus crisis.

Jolly, speaking to MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace on Tuesday, likened Trump’s February claim that the number of cases in the U.S. would soon fall from 15 to “close to zero” to President George W. Bush’s misguided 2005 assertion that then-FEMA chief Michael Brown was “doing a heck of a job” tackling fallout from Hurricane Katrina.

More than 1,000 people in the U.S. have now been sickened by the coronavirus outbreak. It has killed 31 people nationwide.

“It was that moment where he can’t take it back,” said Jolly, a GOP member of Congress from 2014 to 2017.

“And whether it’s incompetence or not, what Donald Trump doesn’t realize in this moment is the American people are fearful,” Jolly continued. “He is not providing leadership. In fact, he is asking for people to accept his grievance that he is not getting a fair shake.”

Check out the interview here:

Earlier in the interview, Jolly noted how “sometimes leadership means not getting out in front of a story, but simply reassuring the American people.”

“I think we’re all wondering if we’re living through the week where this is the turning point,” he added. “The markets saw the turning point last week and yesterday our American families now seeing the turning point.”

“And what the country’s asking for is a president who can calm not just the markets, but calm their fears,” Jolly continued. “Bill Clinton built part of his political narrative by saying, ‘I feel your pain.’ Donald Trump is asking the nation to feel his and it is a weird leadership quality in a moment of crisis.”

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