On MSNBC with Ali Velshi this morning, DNC Chair Tom Perez discussed how Trump’s incompetent COVID-19 response contributed to historic unemployment rates,  making it harder for our economy to come back.

WATCH HERE:

Chair Perez: “We are in a huge ditch. I mean, when we left the administration in 2017, Hispanic unemployment was 5.9%. Now it’s over triple, it’s like 18.7% or 18.9%. African American unemployment rate over double what it was at the end of the Obama administration. We had the longest uninterrupted streak of private sector job growth in our nation’s history and that was wiped out in six weeks because of this president’s incompetent response and regretably what I see, Ali, moving forward because this president doesn’t understand that until we have testing and tracing at scale, we can’t get the economy back at scale. And so, his continued incompetence is making it harder for our economy to come back, and so there’s so many small businesses who are under capitalized on a good day, so the notion that they can bounce back right away is really, I think fanciful at the moment. I want us to get back as soon as possible, but when you don’t have the leadership here in the White House, when you don’t have a plan for getting people back, we have to fix the public health in order to fix the economy. And what has happened with this president is he’s created a false choice. I either open the economy, or I fix the public health problem. You fix the public health problem in order to open the economy.”