While we understand – although don’t approve of – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi playing politics during this coronavirus crisis, her comment that President Trump fiddled while people died was way over the line.
According to Fox News, the Congressional General Accountability Office reported federal agency complaints of ventilator shortages over a period of almost two decades – spanning the George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations. So this was not a new issue.
Meanwhile, a Johns Hopkins University study in late 2019 ranked the United States the best-prepared country in the world to handle a pandemic. While the Johns Hopkins report also describes some Trump administration shortcomings, they appear to be largely peripheral.
In sum, while Mr. Trump and company undoubtedly made mistakes in regards to the coronavirus pandemic, we should take Ms. Pelosi’s version of them with several grains of salt.