Outspoken billionaire Donald Trump, who for weeks has been ranting about what he characterizes as the Obama administration's feeble response to Ebola, has taken to Twitter to blame Obama for the newest U.S. Ebola patient and call for the president's resignation.
About three hours later, Trump blasted another Tweet, blaming the president for allowing Dr. Craig Spencer, the most recent American diagnosed with Ebola, back into the U.S. from Guinea, where Spencer traveled to treat Ebola patients. And seven minutes after that he
weighed in again, calling Obama "a total incompetent" for not issuing a travel ban. He tweeted that Obama "is a far worse president than Jimmy Carter!" Trump has been calling for a travel ban since August, when Dr. Kent Brantly and aide worker Nancy Writebol returned to the U.S. after contracting Ebola in West Africa.
"Stop the EBOLA patients from entering the U.S. Treat them, at the highest level, over there. THE UNITED STATES HAS ENOUGH PROBLEMS," Trump tweeted on Aug. 1.
"The U.S. cannot allow EBOLA infected people back. People that go to far away places to help out are great-but must suffer the consequences!"
Trump is especially steamed about Spencer, the New York City doctor. With 8.4 million residents, New York is the most populous U.S. city.
Trump, and Republicans, aren't the only ones critical of Obama's response to the emerging crisis.
In a
Bloomberg Businessweek article with the headline "Obama is Too Cool for Crisis Management," senior national correspondent Josh Green writes that the administration's handling of the Ebola situation follows the Obama White House's familiar pattern of inadequate crisis management.
"The failure is mostly Obama's," according to Green, who notes that the president "was hampered by the same things that have plagued him all along: a liberal technocrat's excess of faith in government's ability to solve problems and an unwillingness or inability to demonstrate the forcefulness Americans expect of their president in an emergency."
He adds that it's "hard not to suspect that Obama's lack of executive experience before becoming president is one reason why he often struggles to strike the right tone."
The response to Ebola "echoes the fitful efforts to address the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, the chemical weapons attacks in Syria, the advance of Islamic State, the rollout of healthcare.gov, and even the shooting of Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Mo.," according to Green.
Obama, Green writes, "still seems caught off guard when things go wrong. In the case of Ebola, you also sense his annoyance at the panic over what remain extremely long odds of a serious outbreak."