President Donald Trump again took aim at Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan in a tweet Sunday morning, bringing attention to questions surrounding a batch of coronavirus tests the state bought from a South Korean company.
The Republican president tweeted a link to a post on the Breitbart website Sunday that referenced a Washington Post article, which reported on ongoing questions about the tests that were slow to be put into use and had to be replaced.
“This RINO will never make the grade,” Trump wrote, using an acronym for “Republican in Name Only.” “Hogan is just as bad as the flawed tests he paid big money for!”
In response, the Republican governor wrote on Twitter that, had Trump done a better job in the early days of the pandemic, “America’s governors wouldn’t have been forced to fend for themselves to find tests in the middle of a pandemic, as we successfully did in Maryland.”
He also called on the president to concede the 2020 presidential election to President-elect Joe Biden.
“Stop golfing and concede,” Hogan wrote.
Hogan announced the $9 million purchase of the roughly 500,000 tests from LabGenomics in April, meant to bolster Maryland’s stockpile of testing equipment during the beginning of the pandemic when such tests were harder to come by.
Maryland Policy & Politics
However, questions began to emerge about the tests’ use in the following months. The state had purchased a second shipment of replacement tests in May and a University of Maryland laboratory stopped using the tests in September after seeing a string of false positives.
Last week, The Baltimore Sun reported that an inspection by the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the Maryland Office of Health Care Quality found that the University of Maryland lab had several problems processing those coronavirus tests, but did not point the blame at either the test or the lab itself.
[ Inspectors call for improvements at University of Maryland lab using South Korean coronavirus tests ]
Hogan and Trump have publicly sparred throughout Trump’s administration, particularly over the response to the pandemic. In the 2016 general election, Hogan wrote in his father, late Congressman Lawrence Hogan Sr., as a candidate for president instead of voting for Trump or Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton.
The governor again declined to participate in the presidential election this year, this time voting for deceased former Republican President Ronald Reagan instead of Trump or Biden.
On CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday morning, Hogan called attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 general election by Trump and his allies “completely outrageous.”