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LETTERS

Trump’s trashing of Obama’s Ebola efforts seen in a glaring new light

President Obama, at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta in September 2014, announced that he was sending 3,000 US troops to West Africa nations fight the spread of the Ebola epidemic.Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press

Michael A. Cohen is right that “there’s little doubt” that President Trump’s “catastrophic response to the pandemic contributed to the still-rising death toll” (“Congratulations, President Trump: You’re the worst!” Ideas, May 10). From this vantage consider the many tweets Trump sent when he was a New York developer and attacked President Obama for his handling of the awful but nonetheless incomparably less consequential Ebola outbreak.

On Oct. 15, 2014, Trump tweeted that “President Obama has a personal responsibility to visit & embrace all people in the US who contract Ebola!” On Oct. 23, 2014, he kept ramping it up: “If this doctor, who so recklessly flew into New York from West Africa, has Ebola, then Obama should apologize to the American people & resign!” What utmost hypocrisy. Now Trump, by his mishandling of this incomparably worse COVID-19 pandemic that has killed tens of thousands of Americans and wrecked the US economy, should follow his own advice, and we ourselves should strongly call for him to step down.

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Notably, Trump made these tweets less than nine short months before announcing that he would run for president to try to become Obama’s successor.

James Adler

Cambridge