Jay Inslee Says Trump Should Be 'Removed From Office' for His Disastrous COVID-19 Response
Jay Inslee is no stranger to wrestling with big existential issues. The 69-year-old governor of Washington state has spent much of his career studying and speaking out about our rapidly warming planet. He supported a Green New Deal long before the idea came into fashion. He shaped his recent, short-lived presidential bid around the climate crisis, proposing far-reaching solutions like a “just transition” away from fossil fuels to a clean-energy economy.
In late January, Inslee was confronted with a global disaster of a different sort. His state recorded the country’s first COVID-19 infection and one of the earliest virus-related deaths. “We were aware with the Wuhan situation that this infection was likely to be a worldwide phenomenon, and we’re part of the world,” he says. “We were thinking about those things before we had a confirmed case, but it’s like anything else: When it actually arrived, that’s a different kettle of fish. It’s been a day-to-day effort, and every day has been part of the war.”
As the infection rate and death toll climbed, Inslee responded with public pleas to socially distance and avoid human contact. It wasn’t until March 23rd that he issued an executive order that required citizens to shelter at home. Some critics have said he should have acted sooner, but Inslee says it was naive to expect his 7 million citizens to accept a state of lockdown without exhausting other options first. “It’s just a shock to the system,” he says. “You can’t expect a large group of people to accept the necessity of things they’ve never experienced before.”
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The missing partner in all of this, Inslee says, is the federal government.
In a feisty interview with Rolling Stone, Inslee singled out President Trump’s “abject lack of leadership” and denial of the science of COVID-19. “It’s akin to Franklin Delano Roosevelt on December 8th, 1941, and for months thereafter, saying that Pearl Harbor was a hoax, and that the battleships weren’t important, and that the Japanese were going to surrender miraculously the next Monday,” he says. “That’s kind of the scenario we have had from the current president.”
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https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/jay-inslee-trump-coronavirus-governors-white-house-covid-denial-1006114/
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