Donald Trump has a whole new Mike Pence problem
On Friday, Donald Trump told the television cameras that he didn’t want to let a coronavirus-infected cruise ship come to port – even though it had American citizens on it – because doing so would increase the total number of people in the U.S. infected with the disease. Because Trump was focused on appearances, and not any valid medical reasoning, he was widely slammed for it.
The storyline got ugly enough that Mike Pence (or someone in Pence’s camp) leaked to Politico on Saturday evening that Pence had given orders for the cruise ship to be docked, and that Donald Trump had overridden him. This wasn’t shocking. Trump was playing with these people’s lives for no good reason, and if any of them ended up dying, the people around Trump would want to make sure that the blame landed solely on Trump’s head, and not on their own.
Just hours after the Trump-Pence leak happened, the AP announced that the cruise ship will indeed be coming ashore at the Port of Oakland sometime late on Saturday night. In other words, Trump caved, after he realized how much pushback he was going to get on this. But how much harm did he cause to the passengers’ safety by letting them twist in the wind for an extra day and a half?
