Warren: I feel ‘deep down fury’ that Trump downplayed pandemic

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on Thursday blasted President Trump’s remarks to Bob Woodward on the coronavirus pandemic, telling MSNBC’s Joy Reid they inspired “deep down fury” in her.

Reid specifically mentioned the death of Warren’s brother from the virus and asked her reaction to the comments in light of that.

“It is a deep down fury,” Warren responded. The president, she said, not only “knew he was lying – he was lying and he wasn’t putting together the kind of response we needed. A leader would have come to the American people and said ‘This is really dangerous, this is something we’ve got to be very, very careful with and we’ve got to get to work right now, we’ve got to mobilize'” to ensure widespread availability of tests and personal protective equipment.

“If he had done that back in February, how many lives would have been saved in March, in April, in May and June and July and August, how many lives would have been saved?” Warren continued. “And I must share what 190,000 other families must share and that is, ‘Could it have been my brother who could have been saved?’”

Warren noted the particular impact of the virus in minority communities, adding “we have a leader who seems to have both no human understanding of what it means to the rest of us to lose someone we love and no understanding that as president it’s his responsibility to put together a competent response, which he has completely failed to do.”’

In a February interview for Woodward’s book “Rage,” Trump called the virus “deadly stuff” that was far more dangerous than the flu, even as he would later publicly compare it to the flu several times. In March, Trump told the veteran journalist he “wanted to always play [the virus] down … because I don’t want to create a panic.”