How Trump's China-coronavirus passivity gave way to a blame game

President Donald Trump's record of flinching rather than facing coronavirus as it emerged from China grows more obvious by the day. Now that the virus has spread widely enough to kill more than 60,000 Americans, Trump is obscuring his months of passivity to create a revisionist tough-on-China tale meant to help his reelection.

Trump's hard-line trade adviser Peter Navarro, who wrote such books as "Death by China" and "The Coming China Wars," found himself ignored in the White House at a moment when his deep skepticism of the Beijing regime might have helped inform a U.S. response. Navarro's Jan. 29 internal memo warned that lack of an existing cure or vaccine "elevates the risk" of a full-blown pandemic imperiling millions of Americans.

For weeks that followed, Trump practically ridiculed those expressing concern about the virus's threat. The day after a second Navarro memo on Feb. 23, Trump tweeted that the virus was "very much under control in the USA." On April 7, he told reporters of Navarro's memos: “I didn’t see them. I didn’t look for them."

As far back as November, U.S. intelligence officials warned of a contagion ravaging China’s Wuhan, threatening a global pandemic, according to numerous published reports. Through January and February, the problem was described in more than a dozen classified briefings prepared for Trump, who during his tenure has openly dismissed U.S. spy agency information, most notably regarding Russian election meddling and Saudi Arabian assassination of a journalist.

Over and over, Trump hailed China and President Xi Jinping for a purportedly swift and transparent response. "Trump rolled over for the Chinese. He took their word for it," presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said in a campaign ad.

So Trump has never had more motive to deploy his familiar brand of deflection. As usual he makes it about himself as he turns up the blame. “China will do anything they can to have me lose this race,” he told Reuters this week. He claimed with the usual lack of factual backup that China wants Biden to win the race to ease pressure on trade relations.

Consequences for China? "I can do a lot," Trump said, without elaborating.

At this late date, he speaks vaguely of seeking billions of dollars in compensation and intelligence investigations into China's handling of its coronavirus outbreak.

If Trump is working true to form, a fevered effort will be made on his behalf to concoct a link between Biden and former President Barack Obama and the widely rumored possibility that the pestilence sprang from a bio lab in Wuhan. Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani already has issued one of his cryptic, semi-coherent tweets about the National Institutes of Health allegedly funding Wuhan lab research.

Despite the World Health Organization's early curtsying to China to secure Beijing's cooperation, it took Trump until mid-April to announce a cutoff of the U.S. share of funds to the WHO. Before that, American officials involved with the UN organization relayed information about the threat's potential scope.

“Well, I think China is very, you know, professionally run in the sense that they have everything under control," Trump said Feb. 10. "I really believe they are going to have it under control fairly soon … World Health Organization and a lot of them are composed of our people. They’re fantastic.”

And yet, in late January, China's most famous epidemiologist, Dr. Zhong Nanshan, went to investigate Wuhan himself. He said on China's state-controlled television that local officials had covered up the severity of outbreak, that COVID-19 spreads quickly and that doctors were dying. Even if you mistakenly trusted top officials in China, there was ample reason to suspect that the virus would not, in fact, be "under control fairly soon."

Don't bet that Trump's shaky deflection campaign will convince anyone but his loyal fans. Trump has now been all over the board on China, the propaganda hollow on both sides. Trump's chatter about "raping our country" and his brief use of "China virus" proved as meaningless as his having fondly congratulated Xi on the 70th anniversary of the People's Republic of China. The utility of their relationship was tested in the form of a virus; the results for the people appear to be negative.

By Dan Janison

dan.janison@newsday.comDanJanison

Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.