Statement by Vice President Joe Biden on Today’s Unemployment Claims

Once more, millions of Americans filed new unemployment claims last week — 3.8 million more individuals off payroll. More than 30 million Americans have now lost their jobs since this pandemic seized our nation. This shocks the conscience of every American. It’s a national economic disaster.

The Trump administration’s economic response has been a disaster too. They’ve done exactly what we feared from the beginning: bailed out the wealthy and well-connected while leaving worthy small businesses out in the cold. A publicly-traded real-estate trust that owns a Ritz Carlton got $38 million in the initial round of “small business” funding. Meanwhile, the Center for Responsible Lending estimates that more than 90 percent of small businesses owned by people of color will get nothing.

Outrageous? Yes. Surprising? No. These are the latest damning signs of Donald Trump’s manifest incompetence.

Millions upon millions of Americans are suffering economically, there are more than a million confirmed COVID-19 cases nationwide, and we have now lost more American lives to this virus in just a few weeks than we did in all 20 years of the Vietnam War.

One of the hardest parts of this tragedy is knowing beyond a doubt that it didn’t have to be this way. The lack of preparation, the slow response on testing, the failure to administer the relief in the CARES Act appropriately — all of it stems from Donald Trump’s failures as president.

This week we learned that the intelligence community sent warning after warning to Trump in the President’s Daily Brief — more than a dozen red-alarms in the vital months of January and February. That’s the pace of alarm often used for an imminent terrorist attack. So either Trump didn’t read his PDB, which is inexcusable, or worse, he knew this was a threat and he made a conscious choice to ignore the warnings, downplay the threat, and endanger thousands of American lives and millions of jobs.

We should have been using January and February to prepare ourselves, to put in place a plan for testing and containment so we wouldn’t have to resort to these extreme social distancing measures that have put our economy into a free fall. Trump didn’t do that, and now we’re all paying the price.