Inslee says Trump coronavirus response akin to if FDR called Pearl Harbor ‘a hoax’

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D) said the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic has been comparable to if President Franklin Roosevelt had called the attack on Pearl Harbor a “hoax.”

Inslee told Rolling Stone in an interview that President Trump responded to the pandemic with an “abject lack of leadership.”

“It’s akin to Franklin Delano Roosevelt on Dec. 8th, 1941, and for months thereafter, saying that Pearl Harbor was a hoax, and that the battleships weren’t important, and that the Japanese were going to surrender miraculously the next Monday,” Inslee said. “That’s kind of the scenario we have had from the current president.”

“If you can imagine Roosevelt doing that, we’ve had an equivalent of that in response to this existential crisis, and it has continued off and on even today, where we have a president who says that testing is overrated when it is absolutely fundamental to our ability to reopen our economy,” he added.

Inslee said his state, an early epicenter for the pandemic, had prepared for “a variety of emergency scenarios,” but added “there is no preparing 7 million people for something they’ve never experienced before. It’s just a shock to the system.”

The governor also defended the time between when the state identified its first cases and when it implemented social distancing measures.

“For those that say we should have started social distancing the day the first case was identified in Wuhan, you know, intellectually that might have made sense, but to think 7 million people would accept that — they would not have accepted that, for obvious reasons,” he said. “You can’t expect a large group of people to accept the necessity of things they’ve never experienced before.”

Inslee added that despite the state being largely prepared for the pandemic, there was an assumption of “stable, effective” help at the federal level, “and that has not been the case.”

Washington state has confirmed 19,585 cases of the virus and 1,095 deaths.