CREDIT WHERE DUE:

Silverstein: Two separate questions. How do you rate Trump's response to the coronavirus pandemic? And then also, the fiscal and monetary stimulus that the government has put out?

Bremmer: Well, I don't know that you can really decouple those things. I mean, Trump's response is both the media response, his communications response. It's his healthcare response. It's his travel response. Right?

Let me tell you what I think about Trump on all of this. If you want to criticize Trump, the two things that you should criticize him for is that he has been a communications disaster and has provided a lot of false hope that probably led to a later response, particularly in red states in social distancing, than we need. And people are going to die because of that. That's a profound negligent leadership point. Right? Trump constantly in sales mode, "This is going to go away. It's going to be a miracle. It's not going to be a big deal." Obviously, something that hurt the country.

Secondarily, under his watch, the United States did not accept the World Health Organization tests. Our tests did not work. We were unable to get them in the hands of enough people fast. As a consequence, we did not have knowledge of the extent of the spread of this virus across metropolitan areas in many states in the United States. Also, putting us on the back foot. So in those two ways, Trump has been a profound failure.

He's also been a failure in terms of the lack of international leadership. Right? That outside of the United States, what the hell have we done? Right? I mean, the Europeans condemned the fact that Trump put travel restrictions in place without telling them first. They found out on CNN. We should never have in this kind of crisis, a response from our allies like that. It should never happen. Our aid on average, $4 million to a country. Right? We're doing virtually nothing. The Chinese are doing vastly more. A lot of their masks don't even work. They're responsible for the damn crisis to begin with, by covering it up. And yet, they're doing better with a lot of our allies, because we're not there internationally.

So those are the three ways that we've really failed, and Trump has really done a bad job. Now, how has Trump done a good job? Well, number one, Trump did shut down travel to China early, and he did it despite the fact that the Chinese were really unhappy about that. And that was really important to do because you had millions of Chinese coming to the United States, and they were infected. Right? A lot of them were vectors, and we didn't have any information on that. We needed to shut that down, so good for us.

Also, the fiscal response and the monetary response that Trump signed... and Mnuchin, his administration worked with Nancy Pelosi. Massive. 

Tweet   @brothersjudd