Donald Trump has renewed his attacks on China in an effort to deflect attention from the way he handled the U.S. coronavirus outbreak.
His administration is investigating how China handled the coronavirus outbreak and he said he will seek damages for the U.S. because China could have helped stop the spread sooner.
China knew by early January that a fast-spreading disease was killing people in Wuhan and tried to cover it up, Holman Jenkins wrote for the Wall Street Journal. In mid-January, “China’s government took steps to expel certain foreign reporters from Wuhan, and then from the country, as well as to silence and threaten with arrest doctors, scientists and local journalists who sought to track the outbreak.”
Trump responded to questions Monday during a press conference at the White House about a German newspaper editorial calling for China to pay Germany $165 billion.
“Germany is looking at things, we are looking at things,” Trump said. “We are talking about a lot more money than Germany’s talking about.”
The story was about Bild, a German tabloid newspaper, which presented China with a mock-up bill — not the German government itself, Mediaite reported. The make-believe bill was for the impact shutdowns have had on the economy following the spread from Wuhan to Europe. Many social media users were confused and thought the German government itself had presented the bill.
Trump has support in going after China for reparations.
Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn proposed that the Treasury Department stop repayment or interest payments on the $1.1 trillion Treasury bonds owned by China.
“Blackburn may be on to something here,” said Stephen Moore, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, in a column for Real Clear Politics. “China needs to learn that its constant violation of the laws of civilized society will not be tolerated.”
The German newspaper ran an article entitled “What China owes us”, written by editor-in-chief Julian Reichelt.
“You (President Xi Jinping), your government and your scientists had to know long ago that coronavirus is highly infectious, but you left the world in the dark about it,” Reichelt wrote. “Your top experts didn’t respond when Western researchers asked to know what was going on in Wuhan.
“You were too proud and too nationalistic to tell the truth, which you felt was a national disgrace.”
The German newspaper called for China to pay what it calculated was $165 billion in damages to Germany, New York Post reported.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel called for China to be more transparent about the early days of the outbreak.
“I believe the more transparent China is about the origin story of the virus, the better it is for everyone in the world in order to learn from it,” Merkel said, according to Channel News Asia.
Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 70: Jamarlin Martin Jamarlin goes solo to discuss the COVID-19 crisis. He talks about the failed leadership of Trump, Andrew Cuomo, CDC Director Robert Redfield, Surgeon General Jerome Adams, and New York Mayor de Blasio.
In an NBC News interview conducted in Mandarin on Tuesday, a senior Chinese government official challenged Trump’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S., accusing him of wasting weeks after the threat first became apparent.
“The true enemy of the U.S. is the COVID-19 virus,” not China, Executive Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng told NBC.
“On Jan. 23 when Wuhan went under lockdown, the U.S. reported only one confirmed case, but on March 13 when President Trump announced a national emergency, the U.S. reported over 1,600 confirmed cases,” Le said. “In this interval of 50 days, what was the U.S. government doing? Where have those 50 days gone?”
