Rory Cooper, a lifelong Republican who worked on disaster response after the 9/11 terrorist attacks under former President George W. Bush, thinks that President Donald Trump is still absolutely blowing the response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Writing in The Daily Beast, Cooper slammed Trump for getting into Twitter fights with Democratic governors at a time when the administration needs to have good working relationships with governors regardless of party affiliation.
“This is a failed approach that the White House needs to correct fast,” he writes. “Close coordination and cooperation with state and local officials is absolutely critical in a crisis like this… After 9/11, as a staffer in the White House Homeland Security Council, I was a point of contact for those officials as we coordinated our ongoing response to the threat of global terrorism. The Bush White House team developed very close, cordial, and trusting relationships with state and local partners that transcended politics.”
He then shredded the president for continuing to nurse petty grievances at a time when all his focus should be on containing the spread of the virus.
The morning after the airport disaster, the president was tweeting just like [Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker] — but his tweets, incredibly, were about Hillary Clinton’s emails,” he writes. “Later Trump tweeted that governors and local officials were responsible for coronavirus testing problems, which showed an extraordinary degree of hubris and inanity.”