Because of lack of leadership, 'we wasted a lot of time' to mitigate pandemic, John Bolton says

Former national security adviser John Bolton criticized President Donald Trump's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic in an interview with PBS NewsHour anchor and managing editor Judy Woodruff on June 25. When asked if Trump put his 2020 reelection efforts ahead of serving the country in how he's handled the pandemic, Bolton said, "I think that's certainly true at the beginning, back in January," when key people in the federal government, including at CDC, were warning about the possible scope and severity of the pandemic. Bolton, the author of an new memoir about his time serving as Trump's national security adviser, said the president did not want to hear "anything negative" about Chinese leader Xi Jinping, China's handling of data around the coronavirus or anything that would further burden U.S.-China trade and hurt the economy. "And I think as a consequence of this 'empty chair in the Oval Office' phenomenon, we wasted a lot of time that could have been used to mitigate the effect of the pandemic," Bolton said.