Barack Obama would have handled the coronavirus pandemic better than Donald Trump, says poll
Former President Barack Obama would have done a better job at handling the coronavirus pandemic as compared to President Donald J. Trump, according to a poll conducted by Politico-Morning Consult and released Wednesday.
However, the same group also said Trump is being a better leader than former Vice President Joe Biden during the outbreak.
In the new poll, conducted April 3-5, 52 percent of the survey's close to 2,000 respondents said Obama would be a better leader than Trump, while 38 percent thought Trump is better between the two.
The pollsters also asked the public a different question which saw 44 percent saying Trump would be the better leader when compared to the Democratic presumptive nominee for president, who got 36 percent support among the respondents.
Meanwhile, on the question of Trump's job performance, the liberal outlet found 54 percent of voters disapproved of his policies while 44 percent said they approved.
Trump has received mixed reactions from the public over his administration's response to the coronavirus. However, several polls over the past couple of months have shown that a majority of Americans approve of the job the president has done to tackle the outbreak.
That said, Trump's opponents on the other side of the aisle as well as several pundits on mainstream media have claimed his administration has not done enough to combat the spread of COVID-19, of which roughly 400,000 cases and more than 12,900 deaths have been reported in the US.
According to the poll released Wednesday, 50 percent of the voters said the White House has not done enough to contain the outbreak. In contrast, 38 percent of the respondents said the Trump administration is doing the right thing, while 4 percent said they believe his administration is doing "too much" to battle the virus.
The report also revealed how the Politico-Morning Consult poll conducted interviews online and had a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. According to the outlet, the poll was weighted “to approximate a target sample of Registered Voters based on age, educational attainment, gender, race, and region.”
Trump recently attacked WHO after its leadership’s repeated praises of Beijing over its handling of the pandemic, something that brought the international health body’s relationship with the Asian superpower under the scanner.
The WHO-China equation remained in the headlines on April 7 after the president lashed out at the UN agency to call it "China-centric."
He also said that he wanted the group to be looked into and also threatened to cut off funding for the health group from the US.
“They called it wrong, they called it wrong, they missed the call,” Trump said during his daily press briefing at the White House.
“They should have known and they probably did know,” the commander-in-chief said, suggesting WHO was hiding information about the coronavirus.
Trump, who has repeatedly called the novel coronavirus as “Chinese Virus” despite objection from his opponents at home and China, accused the WHO leadership of downplaying the need to bar travelers from China even as the pandemic started spreading beyond Wuhan. Recently, it emerged that at least 430,000 people flew in from China into the US since the virus started spreading.