Former President Barack Obama refused to comply with a right-wing senator’s statement that he “should’ve kept his mouth shut” about the current president’s questionable response to the global pandemic.
In fact, Obama, 58, clapped back publicly at conservative U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell and the White House after the Republican senator from Kentucky demanded Obama remain silent and called the 44th president “classless” for criticizing the White House.
So far, Obama has not called out the president by name, but everyone knows who he was speaking about when he blasted the response to the pandemic as “an absolute chaotic disaster,” according to Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News.
Yahoo News also reported that Obama said that there is a lack of “a coherent national plan to navigate this pandemic” and warned of “the consequences of those who denied warnings of a pandemic.”
After getting a whiff of Obama’s critical analysis, McConnell said, “I think President Obama should’ve kept his mouth shut,” during an interview with Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law and an adviser to the reelection campaign.
“I think it’s a little bit classless, frankly, to critique an administration that comes after you,” McConnell added, according to Yahoo. “You had your shot. You were there for eight years.”
Obama, who had been conspicuously silent for months until recently, refused to acquiesce to McConnell’s rude order to be quiet. Instead, Obama relayed another round of thoughts about the precarious predicament in which the nation finds itself because of a lack of adequate leadership:
Despite all the time that’s been lost, we can still make real progress against the virus, protect people from the economic fallout, and more safely approach something closer to normal if we start making better policy decisions now.https://t.co/pfokyI8GiB
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) May 13, 2020
Meanwhile, McConnell is being subjected to widespread condemnation and ridicule for speaking to Obama that way, beginning with the former head of the Republican Party Michael Steele.
In a post on Twitter, Steele wrote: “I’m sure Mitch is aware that a grown a– Black man who happens to be a former president has agency to speak his mind on how his successor is managing this crisis, especially since his successor has yet to keep ‘his mouth shut’ about him. And ‘classless’?”
