Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell criticized Barack Obama Monday evening, lashing out days after the former president reportedly described the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus as an “absolute chaotic disaster.”
“I think President Obama should have kept his mouth shut,” McConnell (R-Ky.) told Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, during an online Trump campaign event.
McConnell added that the critique was “a little bit classless” and said former presidents should follow “the tradition that the Bushes set up of not critiquing the president who comes after you.”
Obama made the remarks during a phone call Friday with former members of his administration. President Donald Trump has vehemently defended his administration’s widely criticized response to the pandemic and Republicans have by and large stood with him.
McConnell also complained in his interview with Lara Trump that “the Obama administration did not leave to this administration any kind of game plan” for a pandemic.
But POLITICO reported in March that the Obama administration’s National Security Council developed a step-by-step playbook on how to fight pandemics. While the Trump administration was told of the playbook’s existence in 2017, it was never used.