Republican lawmakers are magnifying US President Donald Trump’s anti-China rhetoric in Congress as well as in campaign ads across the country amid White House efforts to blame Beijing for the COVID-19 pandemic that has devastated the American economy and killed nearly 100,000 people in the nation so far.
The development comes as Trump has lashed out on Twitter in recent days, claiming that the “incompetence of China” led to “mass Worldwide killing,” Washington-based news outlet The Hill reported Saturday.
Trump further proclaimed that a laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the first outbreak was reported, had accidentally unleashed the virus — an unsubstantiated theory that some of his own top medical experts have rejected, according to the report.
The US president has also threatened economic retaliation against Beijing and the withdrawal of American funding to the World Health Organization (WHO), which Trump and his allies view as complicit in failing to warn the international community about the pandemic.
This is while Trump had praised China’s coronavirus response more than 30 times between January and March as the virus started to spread around the globe, according to a CNN tally.
However, that relationship quickly faded away after the coronavirus death toll and jobless rate in the US began to surge. The contagion has now claimed nearly 100,000 lives and infected almost 1.6 million people across the country; close to 40 million people in the US are now unemployed, according to latest reports.
Republican candidates and lawmakers, the report adds, are taking their cues from Trump, noting: “It’s a message that’s playing well with Trump’s base — nearly a third of voters say they view China as “the enemy” — and is reminiscent of the hardline, anti-immigrant positions that helped propel him to the White House in 2016.”
However, it further underlined that it remains unclear whether ratcheting up the pressure on Beijing will prove to be a winning campaign strategy with the broader electorate amid slumped poll numbers and daily press reports detailing Trump’s slow and shaky response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
For instance, Jim Bognet, a former Trump administration official who’s running in the Republican primary against Pennsylvania’s Democratic Congressman Matt Cartwright, is running ads vowing to “make China pay for the lies they told, the jobs they stole and the lives we’ve lost.”
Moreover, the pro-Trump super PAC America First Action is running $10 million worth of ads in the battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, attacking “Beijing Biden” in an effort to portrait former Vice President Joe Biden as soft on China and its coronavirus response.
Biden, meanwhile, has swung back at Trump with an anti-China ad of his own, arguing that Trump “rolled over for the Chinese” and “let in 40,000 from China into America” during the pandemic.
Biden’s ad prompted condemnation from Asian American groups -- typically aligned with Biden – which slammed it as racist for failing to distinguish between Chinese people and the Chinese communist government.
GOP lawmakers have also proposed a wide variety of bills targeting China. Indiana’s Republican Congressman Jim Banks, a member of the China task force, authored legislation that would make it harder for the Chinese government to invest in US companies crippled by the pandemic.
Another bill by GOP legislators would greenlight a series of retaliatory measures against Beijing, including freezing assets, imposing sanctions and travel restrictions, and requiring China to compensate Americans for COVID-19 losses.
In recent days, GOP legislators have been repeating this refrain — the United States is engaged in a new “cold war” with China — in a bid to rally Americans behind Trump.
Meanwhile, US-China relations were further complicated this past week when Beijing said it would deploy sweeping new security powers that US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned would be the “death knell” for political freedoms in Hong Kong.
The GOP’s China-bashing comes as a growing number of Americans view the global economic powerhouse as a hostile threat to the US. Thirty-one percent of Americans said China is “the enemy,” up 11 percentage points since January, according to a Politico-Morning Consult poll. Only 23 percent of Americans see China as an ally or friend, down 9 points during that same period.
This article has been adapted from its original source.
