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Former Sen. Al Franken (D.-Minn.) sent out a tweet on Monday arguing that a president who was “a malignant narcissist” and “of merely average intelligence” could have stopped the COVID-19 pandemic by taking prudential actions early on.
Franken resigned from the Senate in 2017. Politico described his resignation this way: “Sen. Al Franken said on Thursday that he would resign after seven women came forward in recent weeks and said he groped or tried to forcibly kiss them, capping a stunning fall from grace for one of the Democratic Party’s most popular and high-profile politicians.”
In the same Politico article, Franken is quoted as saying: “Some of the allegations against me are simply not true, others I remember very differently.”
Before beginning his political career, Franken had been a comedian on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.”
“The sad fact is that our country’s horribly inept and tragic response to this pandemic could have been avoided by a malignant narcissist of merely average intelligence,” Franken said in his tweet.
The tweet linked to an essay Franken has written that his headlined, “How a Malignant Narcissist Could Successfully Handle the Coronavirus.” The link to the essay features a photo of President Trump.
In part of his essay, Franken said:
“The sad fact is that our country’s horribly inept and tragic response to this pandemic could have been avoided by a malignant narcissist of merely average intelligence. What was needed back in January and February of this year was a president just smart enough to understand that successfully handling our greatest crisis since World War II would have assured his reelection in the fall.
“Even the laziest malignant narcissist would have realized that the nation would rally around a leader who openly acknowledged the enormous gravity of the pandemic – as many tens of millions of Americans had well before the president himself finally conceded the obvious. Even just a moderately intelligent malignant narcissist would then have understood that he should turn for guidance to science rather than his son-in-law.
“All malignant narcissists are…”
