Trump Targets China to Further His Own Political Agenda

It really should be somewhat obvious. He’s deflecting. Look at the dire situation the US is in because of the total incompetence of the Trump administration. As you know, US President Truman used to say, “The buck stops here.” He had a placard on his desk in the Oval Office that said as much. Well, Trump, of course, says he doesn’t take responsibility for anything. But the whole pandemic in the US occurred on his watch. And he knew well in advance what was to come but he disregarded it.

He was advised by his CDC, his medical experts, and by his intelligence services as well, that this pandemic was looming and that it could have a devastating impact on not only US health services but the economy in general, generating perhaps trillions of dollars of losses to the economy and hundreds of thousands if not millions of deaths, to the American people. Even his rabidly anti-China trade negotiator, Peter Navarro gave him a memo in January, stating as much.

Trump disregarded all the advice that he was being given. The word is, he wanted to protect the stock market from any adverse impacts. So he just whistled a happy tune and fiddled while Rome was about to burn let’s put it that way. And, he has to live with the consequences.

Of course, the US is in dire straits and it’s all on his watch. The economy has tanked as a result of his incompetence and not responding in due course to the looming pandemic. And the death toll which he thought initially would not be more than a handful, has skyrocketed to over 100,000 by the end of this week and many people suggest there’s far more than that.

So, Trump is now stuck between a rock and a hard place. If he continues with quarantines and shelter in place, which only flattens the curve, it just extenuates the impact of the pandemic over a longer period of time. It doesn’t really mitigate the adverse impacts. In terms of the death toll it just extends it over time. That, of course, has a devastating impact on the economy. If he reopens the virus is not under control. The mitigation effects have been piecemeal. They’ve been half measures. So the virus is still there, circulating within the public and once the mitigation efforts are loosened it will reassert itself. I mean, there’s no question about that. So by reopening the economy which is his only recourse given the looming November presidential election, he has to see an uptick in the economy if he’s going to have any chance of winning. He’s willing to sacrifice the American people to have a momentary uptick in the economy, hoping that that will be enough to send him into a second term. In order to do that he has to deflect away from the dire straits that his inaction has placed the US in. And of course, China is the best target.

He’s been attacking China from the get-go. He’s just basically upping the ante so to speak, and accusing China of everything that he himself is guilty of. Lack of transparency and not being forthcoming in terms of the potential damage that the pandemic may have, and on and on and on. He’s just trying to demonize China and the World Health Organization alike. They’re very convenient targets. And some people will accept the false narrative that he and his cohorts have framed. It’s a very deliberate premeditated policy which is basically projecting what the US itself has done onto China, like the idea that China was the source of the Coronavirus.

Well, it’s becoming clear and clearer that if anything, the US may very well be the source and you would think that the CIA and other intelligence services are well aware of the fact that this virus was circulating globally and in the US long before it surfaced in China. The Chinese were the first to identify it because they were on the lookout. They had experienced SARS back in 2003. And they had been burned once so they didn’t want to be burned again, but, it took them some time to recognize what they were dealing with. Not that much time, within a couple of weeks after it was first identified the viral pneumonia was identified as a new virus, as a novel Coronavirus. They sequenced the genome. They gave that information to the scientific community throughout the world. They developed test kits which were then utilized by other nations, particularly in East Asia and Southeast Asia to mitigate the effects of the spreading virus. China did everything in its power to address the crisis. And basically its efforts, allowed other countries to do the same. If it hadn’t been for China’s efforts the virus would have spread unimpeded, unhindered throughout the world. There wouldn’t be such a clear knowledge of its genetic makeup. There wouldn’t be test kits available as early as they were. In the past it took months to get that type of information. China did it within a couple of weeks. By their rapid response, China actually saved hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives. Even though the pandemic has been bad, it could have been far worse.

It’s totally disingenuous of Trump to target China and the World Health Organization and it’s only to further his own political agenda. Xi Jinping in his address to the World Health Assembly totally preempted Trump. Trump has been harping on the fact that the US has made contributions to the World Health Organization, $419 million a year in assessed and voluntary contributions. Of course, the US is in arrears. They haven’t paid their dues for the last year or two. So, his withdrawal of the funds is more apparent than real. And, China has upped the ante. Xi Jinping committed to contributing $2 billion over the next two years to the World Health Organization, far exceeding what Trump is withdrawing. So, Trump is basically having a hissy fit.

They also wanted to set up a kangaroo court, sort of a witch hunt to target China as the culprit in all of this and the assembly did not go along with that. As China has supported, they want to look into the response to the pandemic globally. That would also entail looking at the lack of preparation by the western countries particularly the US after they knew, well in advance, that this virus was circulating. So why were they so lax? Why were they lagging so far behind? That’s what they should be inquiring into. Also where did the virus originate? It was identified first in China, much to their credit, but there’s credible evidence that virus was circulating before the outbreak in Wuhan, in France, in Italy, in Spain, and perhaps in the United States as well.

There’s been a lot of talk about the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab as a potential source for the virus. That’s been debunked and discredited. But what about Fort Detrick? There’s a history of unsafe practices at the Fort Detrick bio-weapons lab in Maryland. The lab was closed in July and August of 2019 because of a leak of contaminated water into the environment, and there have been other instances of lax security at the Fort Detrick laboratory. There were clusters of COVID-19-like respiratory illness in the bedroom community, not far from Fort Detrick that affected two nursing homes where there were scores of illnesses and a number of deaths that were not identified. They could not be diagnosed because they came back negative, for all the known viral agents, suggesting that it was an unknown disease of some sort.

There are many other instances in the summer of 2019 of COVID-like pneumonia in the US, sometimes attributed to vaping or just a spike in influenza deaths. There are all sorts of evidence, circumstantial as it may be, that the Coronavirus was widespread before the outbreak in Wuhan. There’s also genetic evidence which corroborates the idea that the virus had jumped from animals to humans months, if not years, beforehand and had been silently circulating before there was this outbreak. That’s not uncommon in terms of how epidemics and pandemics originate.

So there’s absolutely no substance to the attacks being directed against China. It’s all part of the political maneuvering of the US to demonize China, cast it in a negative light. Sort of bring the fight to China, so it has to defend itself, and it also supports his own political agenda, the jingoism, the racism, the anti-China rhetoric, all feeds into his base and he basically tries to characterize his opponents as being soft on China. Then they have to respond by trying to show that they’re tougher than he is. It’s all part of the American political game and the only real victims are the American people, the people of the world, and of course China which is the innocent party in all of this.

Source: Press TV