Tommy Lee and Dee Snider Slam Donald Trump’s Coronavirus Response
Dee Snider and Tommy Lee are among the musicians who have criticized President Donald Trump for how has dealt with the coronavirus outbreak.
Snider became friends with Trump in 2011 when the Twisted Sister frontman first appeared on Celebrity Apprentice, but he had a public split with Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign. As he told Yahoo! Entertainment, the Trump Administration has handled the pandemic "horribly and embarrassingly — turning down the test kits, making a joke out of it, a mockery, some of these people wearing gas masks or whatever they were wearing during a press conference."
"[I]t just underlines how you need to have a person in power who's got a broad understanding of international issues and all aspects of governing, not just how the stock market is doing," he continued. "So I just hope that this is making some people be more aware that we need a more well-rounded individual at the helm. And hopefully one of these [candidates] will come up and we'll get somebody."
For Snider, it's hitting close to home. His 23-year-old daughter Cheyenne is currently on a spiritual retreat in Iquitos, a remote city in Peru, and is unable to leave due to a border closure in Peru issued by President Martin Vizcarra. Snider said that he'd been on the phone with the U.S. Embassy in Peru for four hours trying to change her flight, but then all travel in and out of Peru was canceled.
He's been able to speak with his daughter and says that she is "safe at the moment, but I fear it to be very unsafe when this [retreat] is over and she's released into the general populace." He also knows that there are other parents all around the world who are separated from their children, and he's hoping his fame can help call attention to their plight as well.
" I immediately realize that this is a plight of thousands," he added. "It's not just my daughter. It's other people's daughters and sons and fathers and mothers who are in this situation. ... I don’t want to be that rock star, saying, 'My daughter before everybody else!' I just want her be in that line [to get on a flight], because I’m not going to sleep well until she's back home."
Lee, a frequent critic of the president, chose someone else's words to criticize Trump. He tweeted an open letter by Craig Alan Wilkins that described Trump as being "so out of [his} depth" during his press conference about COVID-19 that he "needed scuba gear. Within minutes of going off air your minions were backpedaling faster than Cirque du Soleil acrobats."
The rest of the letter takes Trump to task for other actions he and his administration have done throughout his presidency, using extremely profane language and imagery.
Former Skid Row singer Sebastian Bach was most upset after Trump's press conference yesterday (March 20), when he called NBC News' Peter Alexander a "terrible reporter" after Alexander asked him for a message to give to those who are fearing for their lives.
Bach tweeted, "You should have told him what we were all thinking. "'No. You're a terrible president' would have gone down in history dude why don't you guys call him out on his b*******.
Twenty minutes later, Bach retweeted Alexander's video response, with the message, "The United States of America is Over until further notice. There is no end in sight. Our reality TV show host leader is a petulant little baby who doesn't believe in science when it's science and science only that will get us out of this science fiction novel. He is killing us."