Karl Rove on how coronavirus response could impact 2020 election
Fox News contributor Karl Rove responds to Biden's criticism of Trump's coronavirus response.
Fox News contributor and former White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove told "Your World" Friday that President Trump should contrast his response to the coronavirus pandemic with the Obama administration's lackluster response to the 2009 H1N1 -- or "swine flu" -- outbreak.
Rove told host Neil Cavuto that Trump had all the more reason to take that tack after White House coronavirus task force members Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Robert Redfield testified before the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis earlier Friday.
"It was very interesting because they said we are doing everything we should be doing now," Rove said. "These are not easy situations, there is no simple formula, but we are doing everything that we should be done is being done now."
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Rove said the testimony of Fauci and Redfield offered "a strong defense of the administration’s perspective."
"This is a difficult time for the president, but he’s got to continue to say, 'This is what I have done, here are the challenges that I have faced in all of this ... and here’s the contrast with my opponent."
To that end, Rove recalled that Obama's so-called "ebola czar" Ronald Klain, said last year that the H1N1 response was made up of "a bunch of really great, really talented people [who] were working on it -- and we did every possible thing wrong."
"Sixty million Americans got H1N1 in that period of time, and it's just purely a fortuity that this isn't one of the great mass casualty events in American history," Klain added, according to The Blaze. "It had nothing to do with us doing anything right. It just had to do with luck."
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The former George W. Bush adviser added that Biden himself gave Trump an attack angle last week when he laid out six "new" strategies to combat the pandemic in an interview with MSNBC.
"He listed six things, every one of which is being done by the administration already," Rove said, "from using the Defense Production Act to appointing a commissioner to be in charge of production and distribution of vaccines."
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