Conservative columnist Max Boot called out President Donald Trump on Monday for delivering misinformation instead of the calm and steady leadership needed as the nation faces the twin crises of the coronavirus outbreak and spasming financial markets.
“Panic is spreading even faster than the coronavirus because there is no leader to reassure a jittery public,” Boot wrote in The Washington Post,
Boot noted that Trump already lacked credibility before the crisis. Now, Trump “has stayed true to incredible form.”
Last month when speaking about the outbreak, Trump claimed to have “shut it down” and predicted “close to zero” cases in the U.S. And just last week, Trump claimed: “We closed it down; we stopped it.”
Boot even compared Trump to Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, the ex-Iraqi information minister better known as “Baghdad Bob” for his comically false denials about the grim reality of the situation during the U.S.-led invasion in the early 2000s:
This is a time that calls for the candor and reassurance of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘fireside chats.’ Instead, we have a president who is emulating ‘Baghdad Bob’ — the Iraqi minister of information who was claiming complete victory even as Saddam Hussein’s regime was collapsing in 2003.