Hours after Donald Trump shared a cartoon attacking Mitt Romney, which depicted him standing alongside the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer beneath the caption, “Democrats Continue Torching America,” the Utah Republican went on the offensive. “Yesterday, you celebrated that we had done more tests and more tests per capita even than South Korea” Romney said during a hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee on Tuesday, addressing Admiral Brett Giroir, the president’s assistant secretary for Health and Human Services. “But you ignored the fact that they accomplished theirs at the beginning of the outbreak, while we treaded water during February and March.”
Politicians, he said, will “frame data in a way that’s most positive politically,” but he chastised Giroir, a military leader, for following suit. He went on to note that the “U.S. had completed just 2,000 tests” by March 6, the same date that South Korea’s testing total had shot up to 140,000. He concluded that America’s testing record is “nothing to celebrate whatsoever,” the coronavirus having now taken the lives of more than 80,000 Americans, while South Korea’s death toll remains in the mid-200s.
By now, the president’s media supporters have a well-used anti-Romney playbook. The familiar attacks surfaced again on Tuesday and Wednesday, punishment for the Republican senator stepping out of line. “Still bitter he didn’t get picked by Trump,” wrote Jason Miller, a former top Trump communications aide who left his role after being caught in an alleged sex scandal, but who still acts as an unofficial surrogate, referring to Romney’s onetime potential candidacy for secretary of state. Shortly after the Senate testimony, pro-Trump columnist Kurt Schlichter posted a Twitter poll to choose the “biggest over-hyped conservative disappointment,” a title that Romney won, while conservative radio host Buck Sexton suggested that Romney’s line of criticism is “really not about testing at all, but just Orange man bad.”
Early Tuesday evening, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany continued the administration’s testing boasts, telling reporters that the U.S. is now “outdoing what South Korea has done, and let’s note that South Korea was the gold standard for testing.” However, as Romney noted, McEnany’s argument is wildly misleading; South Korea is currently trailing the U.S. because they have dramatically fewer cases due to their testing and mitigation efforts during the outbreak’s earliest stages—the same weeks that Trump insisted coronavirus was “under control” and predicted case numbers would go “very substantially down” to “close to zero.”
At another point in the hearing, Romney asked Dr. Anthony Fauci to fact-check Trump’s claim that Barack Obama, who ran against and defeated Romney, is somehow “responsible” for the country’s coronavirus woes. “Is President Obama or, by extension, President Trump—did they do something that made the likelihood of creating a vaccine less likely?” he said, to which Fauci replied, “Not at all.” Despite Obama leaving office more than three years before the COVID-19 outbreak, Trump—in a line reminiscent of the “Thanks, Obama” and “Blame Bush” jokes of yesteryear—has suggested that the last president bears some responsibility for the pandemic. “I started with an obsolete, broken system from a previous administration,” the president said last month. “Unfortunately, some partisan voices are attempting to politicize the issue of testing, which they shouldn’t be doing, because I inherited broken junk. Just as they did with ventilators where we had virtually none, and the hospitals were empty.” Others, like Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have suggested the same: “Clearly the Obama administration did not leave to this administration any kind of game plan for something like this,” he said during an appearance on the Trump campaign’s online network.