Donald Trump at press conference (image via White House)With Trump under fire for his handling of the outbreak, Oval Office advisers are looking to shift blame to the CDC.
From Politico:
White House officials are putting a target on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, positioning the agency as a coronavirus scapegoat as cases surge in many states and the U.S. falls behind other nations that are taming the pandemic.
Trump administration aides in recent weeks have seriously discussed launching an in-depth evaluation of the agency to chart what they view as its missteps in responding to the pandemic including an early failure to deploy working test kits, according to four senior administration officials.
Part of that audit would include examining more closely the state-by-state death toll to tally only the Americans who died from Covid-19 directly rather than other factors. About 120,000 people in the U.S. have died of the coronavirus so far, according to the CDC’s official count.
Politically, Trump aides have also been looking for a person or entity outside China to blame for the coronavirus response and have grown furious with the CDC, including its public health guidance and actions on testing, making it a prime target.
SCOOP: WH aides eyeing an an evaluation of the CDC to chart its missteps on coronavirus. Also thinking of putting more political appointees at agency and shrinking its mission, as Trump ppl look for a Covid-19 scapegoat w/@adamcancryn: https://t.co/Ji2pArPGqr
— Nancy Cook (@nancook) June 23, 2020
1) Trump’s advisers are targeting a new scapegoat in order to shift blame away from his utterly catastrophic botching of coronavirus: The CDC.
This is deeply depraved on its own.
But there’s a backstory here that simply must not get memory-holed.https://t.co/xsZ06HH4yf
— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) June 23, 2020