Nearly 18,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 on President Joe Biden's watch—the equivalent of 7.5 Pearl Harbor attacks. In response, the Biden administration on Monday vowed to "speed up" efforts to redesign the $20 bill.
Thanks to a challenging question from a courageous journalist, White House press secretary Jen Psaki was finally forced to reveal the administration's stance on replacing Andrew Jackson, the genocidal founder of the modern Democratic Party, with renowned firearms enthusiast Harriet Tubman.
"The Treasury Department is taking steps to resume efforts to put Harriet Tubman on the front of the new $20 notes," Psaki said. "It's important that our notes, our money ... reflect the history and diversity of our country ... so we're exploring ways to speed up that effort."
In response to questions more directly related to the COVID-19 pandemic, Psaki dodged, refusing to say how many vaccination doses were currently available in the United States but insisting that the situation "is much worse than we could have imagined" because of Donald Trump.
Psaki also declined to identify the individuals with whom Biden is reportedly negotiating a COVID-19 relief package, adding that it would be "perfectly fine" for the mysterious negotiators to speak out on their own. Journalists did not appear discouraged by the dangerous lack of transparency.
Psaki did, however, make clear that the Biden administration plans to keep in place the Trump-era travel restrictions that were widely denounced as "xenophobic" and initially discouraged by the China-affiliated World Health Organization. Dr. Anthony Fauci has applauded the travel bans for saving lives.
Last year, on the same day Trump announced his decision to ban travel from China in response to the pandemic, then-candidate Biden criticized Trump for engaging in "hysterical xenophobia" while ignoring the advice of scientific experts, such as those at the WHO. A Washington Post fact-check analysis concluded that whether or not Biden was suggesting the travel ban was xenophobic "is open for debate."