‘Morning Joe’ Guest: ‘This Is Precisely the Time for Criticizing’ Trump

The Financial Times chief U.S. columnist Edward Luce has told MSNBC that now is exactly the time for criticizing President Donald Trump’s response to the Covid-19 global pandemic. Luce spoke to Morning Joe‘s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski on Monday.

Luce criticized White House economic adviser Peter Navarro and worried that resources needed to fight the Coronavirus outbreak would not be properly distributed. Navarro is currently in charge of implementing the Defense Production Act.

“Myself and many other journalists have received a lot of criticism from conservatives during this epidemic,” Luce said.

“That you should all pull together in a crisis, that you should back the President, the commander in chief, and this is no time for criticizing. I think this is precisely the time for criticizing.”

“You saw with yesterday’s press conference, when President Trump is shown the science, when the argument is pressed home, he can real time change bad decisions to good ones. You look at the sort of height of the second World War, you know.”

“Even when the Blitz was at its peak, Churchill was taking criticism in the House of Commons and from the media, as was FDR, during the war. The idea that we should be holding off on our criticisms of the President, it’s been belied by the President changing his mind, for good reasons, having listened to good arguments in the last 24 hours.”

“This is precisely the time where criticism should be focused. The one big concern I’ve got right now — there are several — but the biggest is the fairness in the system of allocating resources to where it is most needed. There is heavy presidential reward/punishment system there for people who were nice to him versus people who aren’t.”