Sarah Sanders says Trump doesn't get credit for his COVID-19 response: “He got government out of the way”

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Citation From the June 30, 2020, edition of Fox News’ Fox & Friends

SARAH SANDERS (FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR): Let's go back to the basics for Donald Trump — change agent, disrupter, outsider. That is a winning message for this president, and I think if he stays focused on it, he's going to do extremely well in November.

STEVE DOOCY (CO-HOST): Well, speaking of disrupter — the disrupter in 2020 is COVID. Because when you looked at the economy and everything, the president was way ahead. He was going to win that argument. But I've heard surrogates for Joe Biden and the Democrats in general on television, over about the last week, and every question — regardless of what is about — they bring it back to COVID, and the administration's response to it. Is that not the real challenge of the administration, to figure out the good answers? Because by November 3rd — you know, we are already over 125,000 Americans have died from it, and that is a number that is heartbreaking — and when they say, “Look, he didn't do enough,” and he goes through the list of things he did, we know this is going to be their big issue.

SANDERS: Yeah, I think if Donald Trump hadn't been president, that number could've been much higher, and could've been much worse. Thankfully the president took some early steps, like stopping travel — which a lot of Democrats criticized him for. One of the other things that Donald Trump did that I think was truly remarkable, that he gets no credit for, is that he got government out of the way. He allowed American companies to step up — American ingenuity to take over, when we needed supplies and resources. He cut the red tape, and let Americans do what they do best.

And he passed a lot of the decision-making down to state and local governments who were closest to the problem. He did exactly what the federal government should've done, and I think it has been completely missed and they are not getting enough credit for allowing individual states and municipalities and cities to make those decisions for the people in their community. In some cases, that's worked extremely well. In other cases, I think we need to hold some of those individuals that made those decisions responsible for not taking the best course of action they could've for the citizens in their community.