Bill Clinton Lashes Out at Trump for Poor Handling of Pandemic

By Staff, Agencies

Former US president Bill Clinton directly attacked President Donald Trump as being incapable of doing his job Tuesday night, accusing him of spending hours a day watching TV and playing around on social media instead of combating the COVID-19 pandemic.

'If you want a president who defines the job as spending hours a day watching TV and zapping people on social media, he's your man,' Clinton said during his speech on the second night of the Democratic National Convention, the Daily Mail reported.

Trump spends several hours a day in 'executive time,' as was revealed last year in a report on his private schedule. It's rare to see an early morning event on his public schedule, which does not reflect all of a president's activities. An early riser, Trump tweets several times a day, most days of the week. And many of those tweets refer to news stories that had aired recently on his favorite networks Fox News and OAN.

Clinton, who spent eight years in the Oval Office in the 1990s, criticized Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, blaming his lack of action for the high infection rate in the United States, where 5.49 million have had the virus and more than 171,000 have died.

'Denying, distracting, and demeaning works great if you're trying to entertain and inflame. But in a real crisis, it collapses like a house of cards. COVID doesn't respond to any of that. To beat it, you've got to go to work and deal with the facts,' Clinton said.

Clinton's speech was a searing indictment of the current president and a pointed break with the post-presidential tradition of not attacking successors. But it was timed at just five minutes, and places early in the two-hour line-up meaning it did not feature on network television coverage.