While the Trump campaign plans an aggressive strategy blaming China for the coronavirus, Democrats and their media allies are holding the Chinese communist party line.
It’s going to be the key fault line in the 2020 campaign — which side do you stand on when it comes to China and its responsibility for the worldwide coronavirus pandemic.
The White House and Republicans have already signaled their line of attack — charge Democrats and presumptive nominee Joe Biden with being soft on China while accusing China of covering up its role in the coronavirus outbreak.
“Coronavirus was a Chinese hit and run followed up by a cover-up that cost thousands of lives,” a memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee says.
That strategy forces Dems to either admit China’s fault — which they won’t, because they think that would be racist or xenophobic — or go all-in for the Chinese government’s lies.
Like Edward Wong, who bills himself as “Diplomatic Correspondent” for The New York Times and a “Nieman Fellow @Harvard.” Well, well, well, a fellow. You can pretty much guess where this is going.
“Republican politicians push anti-China rhetoric to try to win votes in Nov,” Wong tweeted. “These politicians know nothing about China. They back xenophobic, anti-immigrant policies. And they’re covering for Trump’s failures on the virus — more than 50,000 Americans dead.”
Sounds like a very unbiased view. Thanks, Mr. Nieman Fellow.
There’s plenty more propaganda. In a piece for The Atlantic headlined, “Why Trump intentionally Misnames the Coronavirus,” author Ben Zimmer quotes, of all people, CNN’s pompous Jim Acosta, who upbraids Trump on his use of the term “foreign virus” to describe the pandemic.
Journalists who simply parrot the Chinese line, angrily denounce any criticism of China as xenophobic and quote fake reporters like Acosta are why so many Americans are fed up with the mainstream media.
It’s not “anti-immigrant” to investigate how the virus got started in China and why the government deliberately lied about the number of cases and how it quickly spread from human-to-human contact.
Getting Democrats and the media to fall in line for China is just one example of how Republicans plan to run on the coronavirus in 2020.
The White House will likely couple that strategy with sanctions on the Chinese government or even going so far as to sue the communist dictatorship.
Missouri has already taken the first step against China, filing a lawsuit seeking damages for the virus outbreak. But a law called the Foreign Services Immunity Act of 1976 prevents lawsuits against foreign governments, with only a few rare exceptions.
There have also been other attempts to sue China — class action lawsuits filed in Nevada and Florida — that attempt to seek damages on the behalf of “all persons and legal entities in the United States who have suffered injury, damage and loss related to the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus” as well as small businesses that have sustained losses due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, one of the leading conservatives pushing for making China pay for the pandemic, argued that the lawsuits against the communist government should be modeled after the action taken following the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. In that case, families of the victims of the bombing were awarded $2.7 billion in damages.
“Applied to COVID-19, the numbers would be staggering,” Gingrich wrote in a Fox News article. “Furthermore, the United States should join other nations in calculating the economic costs of the pandemic and deliver a bill to the Chinese Communist dictatorship to compensate these countries for the damage it has done to us all.”
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