Rachel's Response [View all]

Trump tweeted this to Rachel Maddow:

Thank you to Rachel @Maddow for putting our Military on full display, and showing how GREAT a job the Federal Government is doing! Also, a special thanks to General Semonite, a Patriot of the highest order and a truly talented engineer and builder!

Maddow responded with this thread:

Hi, Mr. President -- thanks for tweeting that interview. Gen. Semonite and the Army Corps are indeed doing great work, but at nowhere near the scale that is needed.

We're hundreds of thousands of hospital beds behind, months behind schedule, and...
...we're about to see the number of sick patients surge and hospitals overflow in multiple US sites at once.

This is not an NYC problem or even just a city problem. The apex patient surges will not happen tidily, one after the other, they'll flare up all over, overlapping.

Mr. President, with all the heroism and good work we're seeing from Americans around the country, you personally are leading the worst national response of any industrialized nation in the world, in what is now the largest COVID-19 outbreak on earth.

I say this without any malice at all, but please know that the US response is a catastrophe that is on track to cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

Stop talking about yourself and hyping unproven treatments and demanding people compliment you and all the rest of the nonsense.

(1) Nationalize the supply chains for critical medical supplies -- you should have done that months ago. Fifty states fending for themselves is idiotic, but it persists day after day, week after week. You can fix this now.

(2) Get people like VP Pence and your son-in-law out of the way and bring in actual, experienced pandemic response experts and scientists to lead the response and brief the nation.

(3) Some Governors are following your zig-zagging and dithering lead and refusing even now to institute clear stay at home orders to slow the spread of the virus -- tell them unequivocally to change course, now.

(4) Prisons, jails, detention centers will be death traps for prisoners/detainees and staff. They'll also become leaking reservoirs of infection for every community -- order emergency decarceral measures, now, before it spreads wildly everywhere people are kept behind bars.

(5) We're going to need mass testing, a massive effort to isolate those with the virus (separate and apart from uninfected people staying home), a huge data-driven contact tracing effort, and a wartime-level mobilization of health workers and people to support them.

You're failing to do any of that. Any of it. Any of it. You're failing on every measure, and it is worse by the day. Find experts who can do this for the country and please, sir, get out of the way.

Thank you again for tweeting that interview.