ISLAMABAD: A leaked conference call between former US president Barack Obama with former members of his administration has described President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic as “chaotic”, international media reported on Saturday.
Obama has largely kept out of the fray even as Trump has blamed him and his Democratic administration for a variety of problems related to having sufficient supplies to battle the pandemic that has killed more than 80,000 Americans.
But in his call on Friday with 3,000 members of the Obama Alumni Association, people who served in his administration, Obama urged his supporters to get behind Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, who is trying to unseat Trump in the November 3 election.
Obama said the election “is so important because what we’re going to be battling is not just a particular individual or a political party.”
“What we’re fighting against is these long-term trends in which being selfish, being tribal, being divided, and seeing others as an enemy — that has become a stronger impulse in American life,” he said.
He said this is one reason why “the response to this global crisis has been so anemic and spotty.”
“It would have been bad even with the best of governments. It has been an absolute chaotic disaster when that mindset — of ‘what’s in it for me’ and ‘to heck with everybody else’ — when that mindset is operationalised in our government,” Obama said.
“That’s why, I, by the way, am going to be spending as much time as necessary and campaigning as hard as I can for Joe Biden,” he said.
White House spokes-woman Kayleigh McEnany said Trump’s response to the coronavirus “has been unprecedented” and has saved American lives.
She harked back to the Ukraine inquiry launched by Democrats in the US House of Representatives last year that led to House passage of articles of impeachment against Trump. The Republican-led Senate acquitted Trump early this year.
“While Democrats were pursuing a sham witch hunt against President Trump, President Trump was shutting down travel from China. While Democrats encouraged mass gatherings, President Trump was deploying PPE, ventilators, and testing across the country,” she said.
National polls show a tight race between Trump and Biden with six months to go until the election. Biden leads in several battleground states.
Meanwhile, the US accused China and Russia of stepping up cooperation to spread false narratives over the coronavirus pandemic, saying Beijing was increasingly adopting techniques honed by Moscow.
“Even before the COVID-19 crisis we assessed a certain level of coordination between Russia and the PRC in the realm of propaganda,” said Lea Gabrielle, coordinator of the State Department’s Global Engagement Centre, which tracks foreign propaganda.
“But with this pandemic the cooperation has accelerated rapidly,” she told reporters.
“We see this convergence as a result of what we consider to be pragmatism between the two actors who want to shape public understanding of the COVID(-19) pandemic for their own purposes,” she said.
The Global Engagement Centre earlier said thousands of Russian-linked social media accounts were spreading conspiracies about the pandemic, including charging that the virus first detected last year in the Chinese metropolis of Wuhan was created by the United States.
China outraged the United States when a foreign ministry spokesman tweeted a conspiracy that the US military brought the virus to Wuhan, but the two countries reached an informal rhetorical truce in late March after telephone talks between President Donald Trump and his counterpart Xi Jinping.
Tensions have again soared as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pushes the theory that the virus originated in a Wuhan laboratory, a stance that Beijing in turn calls disinformation.
Both the World Health Organisation and the US government’s top epidemiologist say there is no evidence the virus came from a lab, with most scientists saying it emerged at a Wuhan meat market that butchered exotic animals.
