China's President Xi Jinping (L) and US President Donald Trump attend a welcome ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on November 9, 2017. / AFP PHOTO / NICOLAS ASFOURI ASFOURI/AFP via Getty Images)

In Donald Trump’s endless quest to escape responsibility for his bungled and failed response to the worst public health disaster in living memory, it’s now becoming clear that he has settled on blaming China for failing to alert us early on to the serious nature of the pandemic. In this fanciful re-write of history, had China simply been more forthcoming sooner about how easily the virus could spread, Trump would have heroically marshaled the entire apparatus of our federal government to protect Americans by stockpiling PPE and medical equipment, by developing millions of tests, and by enforcing strict social distancing measures to keep the spread of the deadly contagion to a minimum. Leaving aside the fact that reports now confirm U.S. intelligence agencies had been warning about the potential for a pandemic as early as November of last year, the levels of disbelief that must be suspended to accept this formulation are massive, to say the least.

Just as a starting point it would require us to envision a competent, responsive government, one which actually worked for the welfare of ordinary Americans.  There has been no evidence of that attitude in any of this administration’s actions to date. In fact the exact opposite—this administration and the Republican Party that supports it have, in the last three years, done their level best to harm as many Americans as they can get away with, as long as a few narrowly circumscribed interests are rewarded. There has never been, nor is there today, any evidence that this administration values or prizes competence or even an ethic of public service in any aspect of its exercise of power. In effect we are being told to accept on faith that the egregious negligence, minimizing and intentional cover-up of the pandemic’s seriousness would not have occurred had the Trump administration had the same information about it in December as it did in January. But there is simply no reason for anyone to believe that. Nor would there be any difference if, as Trump now asserts (without any basis whatsoever), the virus originated in a “lab.”

It goes without saying, then, that this China fairy tale is not intended for consumption by most thinking Americans, who know from their own painful and ongoing experience how badly the administration has mishandled this thing, but for a narrow breed of  knuckle-dragging, credulous, Republican morons wedded to Fox News and its cast of highly-paid charlatans such as Sean Hannity,  all of whom will happily parrot and peddle the “blame China” trope on cue from their paymaster, Murdoch, Inc. Racism, xenophobia and blame-shifting are the only currency of value in that medium, and because he can’t afford to lose such a reliably gullible element of his base support, Trump evidently hopes he can stave off any unpleasant finger-pointing as many of its members start to sicken and drop dead in the coming months.

China’s official Xinhua news agency which, like everything else in China, is under the complete control of the Chinese Communist Party, has apparently had enough of the Trump “blame game”  The following two-minute video was released today by that agency with the implicit approval of the Chinese government.  It’s an unusual video, employing animated, Lego-like characters, and while some of it, as noted by Josh Marshall of TalkingPointsMemo is patently “self-serving,” most of it, unfortunately, is spot on, and attuned to the actual facts as they occurred.

So be prepared to be embarrassed for your country. Or maybe not so much for your country but for, as Marshall notes, the people in charge of our nation’s response.





It’s depressing that a repressive, totalitarian-leaning state like the People’s Republic of China can make a mockery of the U.S. simply by throwing the administration’s documented history of neglect back in its face. In fact it's highly improbable that they could do this with any degree of success under any scenario involving a U.S. administration prior to this one. The video does contain inaccuracies (no one has publicly said the Chinese created “concentration camps” with their lockdowns, for example ) and in fact it gives the Trump administration too much credit in suggesting that its lack of response was rooted in any concern for “human rights.”  In fact, if anything, the real reasons for Trump’s botching of this crisis are far worse: they were wholly tied to his political calculations.

But as far as history goes, the video is right on point. As Marshall states:

[I]t is certainly self-serving from the Chinese perspective. But big picture, good lord, pretty much completely guilty as charged. China initially bobbled the outbreak, had a major crisis. They mobilized. They shared information with the world. They mounted a massive, historic containment effort, built whole hospitals in a matter of days. The US hung back and did a mix of ignoring it or talking down to the Chinese. Look how they wear masks! Haha. Masks don’t work. Whether poo-pooing or derision the big message was that this didn’t have anything to do with us. Or it was a hoax. Until we had our own catastrophic outbreak and then suddenly you didn’t tell us! You hid the truth from us! You will pay the price! Also please send us masks! We really need masks! Please!

Perhaps most tellingly, with perhaps the greatest longterm repercussions, the Trump administration has failed so badly, so accurately modeled the behavior of five year olds that we’ve gone a decent way toward discrediting the model of civic democracy and the rule of law we should be supporting at home and around the world. We’ve done about as good a job as one could imagine telling the story that maybe the authoritarians just handle things better.