Obama’s been talking a lot more about Trump’s Covid record, and I think it’s not just another attack line:

He’s reminding voters at a key moment about one of his successor’s most catastrophic failures, which too many are too quick to forget:

This came to mind watching Barack Obama headline a campaign rally in Arizona over the weekend.

Link to tweet

“Listen, when I was president ... I had been talking to scientists for a while,” the former Democratic president said. “And so, in my last year in office, we put together a playbook for how to deal with the eventuality of a pandemic — because scientists had been saying, with globalization and travel, etc., rising populations, that at some point there was going to be a pandemic. And so, I said to my team, I said, ‘We’ve got to have a plan,’ just like you do for hurricanes or tornadoes or natural disasters.

“So, we put together this whole playbook, and we ran, we practiced the playbook. We get all the agencies. This is how we’re going to respond. This is how to make sure that the public health systems in all the states are working. Here’s how we’re going to think about the schools. And when Donald Trump came in, we gave over this playbook to them. But the point is, he ignored it.”

After conceding the scope of the pandemic crisis, Obama added that Trump’s failures led to a death toll that could’ve been lower through more responsible governing.

“If somebody tells you that this doesn’t make a difference — having somebody competent, somebody who cares about you, who listens to ordinary people, who listens to people who are experts in these areas — if you hear somebody say, ‘It doesn’t matter,’ it does matter,” the former Democratic president concluded.....

And did I mention that Trump also ignored the pandemic playbook left by his predecessor? Because Obama was right: The incompetent Republican did that, too.

I’m mindful of the fact that memories can be short in politics, but as Trump occasionally whines that he doesn’t get “credit” for the “great job” he did responding to the pandemic, it’s smart of his Democratic predecessor to remind Americans about what actually happened