Monday on MSNBC, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) accused President Donald Trump of creating conspiracy theories in an attempt to distract from his “failure to act urgently,” on the coronavirus pandemic.

In a clip from Sunday’s press briefing, Trump said, “They’ve been delivering for years 10 to 20,000 masks. It’s a New York hospital. It’s packed all the time. How do you go from 10 to 20 to 300,000? Something is going wrong. And you ought to look into it as reporters. Where are the masks going? Are they going out the back door?”

Gillibrand said, “The president is trying to distract the American people. He’s delusional and attacking our first responders. These are the men and women who are risking their lives every day, and it’s beyond understanding that he can’t comprehend that before this epidemic, before a highly contagious virus was throughout our city and state and our country, people didn’t have to wear every moment at work. They do today. I think he’s just purposefully creating conspiracy theories to distract from his lack of performance and lack of leadership in this extraordinary time of need for people across the country.”

She added, “This is a global pandemic, and for President Trump, again, to be spiteful and conspiracy theorists, it’s not helpful. He’s not leading. He’s not governing. He’s trying to place blame on others for his failure to act urgently and early as he should have. He should have been doing the work in January of getting ventilators stockpiled, masks stockpiled out into communities. He should have not restricted the CDC to be the only source of testing for months. He should have allowed every lab in America to come up with a test. We just heard today — or yesterday that we now finally have a rapid test from Abbott Labs. That is the key to beating the coronavirus. Once you have a rapid test that you can give to every doctor, every pediatrician, every community health center, every hospital, then we can know who has to quarantine and who doesn’t, 5hat is how you get the economy opened again. Hopefully, within the next couple of weeks or months that we can regain our footing and know how we can best treat this virus and protect the most vulnerable.”

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