Former Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele lashed out at Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for saying Barack Obama should not have shared his take on President Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Steele, the former lieutenant governor of Maryland and the RNC’s first African American chairman, fired back at McConnell after the Kentucky Republican said Monday during an online Trump campaign event that Obama was “classless” for criticizing his successor and should have “kept his mouth shut.”
“I’m sure Mitch is aware that a grown ass black man who happens to be a former president has agency to speak his mind on how his successor is managing this crisis, especially since his successor has yet to keep ‘his mouth shut’ about him. And ‘classless’?” Steele tweeted Tuesday.
Obama drew McConnell’s ire Friday during a video chat with supporters, during which the former president called Trump’s handling of the pandemic “an absolute chaotic disaster.”
“It has been an absolute chaotic disaster when that mindset — of ‘what’s in it for me’ and ‘to heck with everybody else’ — when that mindset is operationalized in our government,” Obama said.
