BREAKING NEWS: Donald Trump and Joe Biden hold talks on coronavirus crisis after 2020 Democrat slammed administration’s response and offered to call president
- President Donald Trump and Joe Biden spoke by telephone Monday about the coronavirus epidemic, source familiar with call told DailyMail.com
- Biden has been critical of the president’s response to pandemic
- Trump tweeted this am, wondering why Biden hadn’t called
- Former vice president had offered to speak to Trump about it
President Donald Trump and Joe Biden spoke by telephone Monday about the coronavirus epidemic, a source familiar with the call told DailyMail.com.
Details of the conversation were not immediately available although the president will likely be asked about it during his daily White House press briefing.
Trump, in a tweet on Monday, slammed Biden for suggesting holding a virtual political convention this summer in light of social distancing guidelines, and then asked why he never called.
‘What ever happened to that phone call he told the Fake News he wanted to make to me?’ the president wrote.
President Donald Trump and Joe Biden spoke by telephone Monday about the coronavirus epidemic, source familiar with call told DailyMail.com
President Trump tweeted Monday morning, wondering why Joe Biden hadn’t followed up on his offer to talk
The former vice president proposed speaking with Trump about his response to the coronavirus outbreak, including advising him on how to handle the pandemic.
‘Our teams will be in touch and we will arrange a call,’ Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s deputy campaign manager, said in a statement last Wednesday after Trump was asked if he would speak with the former vice president.
‘I would absolutely take his call,’ Trump said at a coronavirus press briefing last week. ‘I would love to speak with him, sure.’
Biden has been critical of the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus outbreak, saying that the president was too slow to take action in combatting the disease.
He told reporters last week that he hoped Trump could ‘learn some lessons’ from the Obama administration, which dealt with outbreaks of Ebola in Africa and the swine flu in the United States.
‘We’ve been through this in a slightly different way in the past, and I hope they can learn some lessons from what we did right and maybe what we did wrong,’ Biden said, noting that his team had been working to arrange the conversation with Trump.
The former vice president has publicly urged Trump to listen to medical experts, use the Defense Production Act to order companies to make the medical supplies needed, and to be more frank with American people about the dangers of the disease.
‘If I see something that’s not happening, I think it’s my obligation to step up and say, “This is what we should be doing,”‘ Biden said last month on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press.’