Trump’s bluster over the coronavirus and China fails to do his re-election hopes any favours

Trump’s efforts to deflect and distract are not having the desired effect, given that the president and public opinion are poles apart on the coronavirus response
No amount of blaming Beijing will paper over the looming threat that rising unemployment poses to the US economy’s recovery

Brian P. Klein

Published: 3:00am, 27 May 2020

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With about five months until the election, US President Donald Trump faces stagnant approval ratings, a persistent coronavirus and an economic recovery at risk. Instead of focusing on pressing domestic issues, he is painting a Chinese target both on Joe Biden’s back and as a stand-alone straw man in an effort to distract the public.

This won’t work. Americans want their jobs back without another surge in cases and months of new self-quarantine more than a foreign policy “win”. Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell has warned that unemployment may hit a Great Depression-era level of 25 per cent. Former Fed chairwoman Janet Yellen said second-quarter GDP could fall by 30 per cent. No amount of blaming Beijing will change this.

When it comes to presidential elections, international disputes rarely decide the outcome. Despite the ideological Cold War battles with the Soviet Union, Ronald Reagan won 48 out of 50 states in 1984 on one main issue, his handling of the economy. The US was then two years into a recovery with low inflation and low unemployment.

Trump is no Reagan, and a coronavirus-ravaged US economy in 2020 couldn’t be more different than the booming 1980s. He is already at odds with a public that has the coronavirus foremost on their minds. An April Pew Research survey showed 65 per cent of respondents thought he had acted too slowly to address the coronavirus threat, 66 per cent believed state governments would open too quickly and 73 per cent believed the worst was still to come.

Trump is on the opposite side of all these. He says he not only handled the outbreak perfectly but having the world’s largest number of infections is a “badge of honour” because that shows the most testing. He has pushed for reopening quickly despite entreaties from public health experts to go slower.

He has also claimed victory over the coronavirus. In the weeks since the survey, there have been nearly a million more US coronavirus cases and the country is on the verge of crossing 100,000 deaths.

Against this backdrop, Trump has launched a strategy of deflection featuring China, which usually appears as a line or two in stump speeches. In the 1990s, then-candidate Bill Clinton criticised George H.W. Bush for coddling Beijing on human rights issues.

China joins a growing list of diversions, including a fabricated criminal conspiracy dubbed “Obamagate”, attacks on the media as “fake news” and a campaign against mail-in ballots as voter fraud.

There is some truth to Trump’s criticism of Beijing. The government stymied early efforts by the World Health Organisation to gain information from Wuhan about the outbreak. They silenced doctors such as Li Wenliang from getting early warnings to the rest of the world. He later died of Covid-19. There is evidence of Chinese government-backed hacking, economic espionage and intellectual property theft.

There are also reasons to be legitimately concerned about China’s exploitation of Western media, business and economic openness, its military expansionism and a newly aggressive foreign policy eager to challenge regional and international systems.

04:12

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All of these have led to the American public turning largely negative about China. Almost two-thirds hold unfavourable opinions, up from 34 per cent a decade ago, and nearly as many view China as a threat. When Beijing’s new hawkish diplomats promote conspiracy theories, they only add to the distrust even though Trump does the same by peddling a debunked Wuhan virus lab story.

Now bilateral relations are conducted through tweets. Trump pushes the China-backs-Biden story. Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of the state-run Global Times, replies that Trump’s eccentricity makes the world hate the United States and strengthens China.

Trump has escalated the hostility by framing the coronavirus in militaristic terms. He has said the outbreak is “the worst attack we've ever had on our country … This is worse than Pearl Harbour. This is worse than the World Trade Centre.” Rhetoric like this is no surprise from a White House that routinely engages in extremist language.

Perhaps this is a sign of desperation, a fit of incendiary pique when nothing he says lasts more than a few days in the news cycle. That’s one of the problems of engaging in bombast. Like an addictive drug, his political base needs more outrageous claims to feed an insatiable appetite for clickbait conspiracies and over-the-top entertainment.

So far, none of this has significantly altered the trajectory of the outbreak, a worsening recession or his re-election prospects. Those facts, lost in the maelstrom of his own misinformation, will not stop him from increasing the volume in the months ahead.

‘Don’t defend Trump – attack China’: Republican memo reveals virus strategy

He will try to paint Biden as a “panda hugger” despite evidence of Trump’s own pandering to Beijing. He will blame China for a cover-up he claims is responsible for the pandemic despite his own botched response and neglect of increased testing.

The American public’s main concern is what happens next, not who let the virus out. No amount of great power rivalry will turn their attention from the economy for long. The great deflection, like all long cons, will collapse under the weight of its own half-truths and lies. This strategy hasn’t defeated the pandemic, and it doesn’t hold the key to victory in November.

Brian P. Klein (@brianpklein) is the founder and CEO of Decision Analytics, a New York-based strategic advisory and political risk firm. He previously served as a US diplomat focused on Asia

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