The Trump campaign has begun mobilizing for the general election in earnest. Its latest offensive links de facto Democratic nominee Joe Biden to the Chinese Communist Party.
Democrats are reportedly fearful that such a strategy could work. They shouldn't be. They should neutralize it and join the GOP in naming and blaming the Chinese dictatorship for the deaths of a minimum of 141,000 people and destroying the global economy. If they don't, then President Trump will probably be a two-term president.
For months, Senator Tom Cotton sounded the alarm on the murky origins of the coronavirus. Sure, it's possible that a bat-borne virus emerged from a wet market that didn't actually sell bats — even though "patient zero" had no connection to the market. But was it at least worth entertaining the potential that it emerged from a civilian virology lab specifically studying novel coronaviruses just a few miles away?
Further reporting has vindicated Cotton for at least asking questions. U.S. diplomats had warned the State Department that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was unsafely studying and engineering novel coronaviruses with the potential for animal-to-human transmission. And now, Bret Baier and Gregg Re broke the story that top U.S. officials now believe that COVID-19 did indeed emerge from a Wuhan laboratory, "not as a bioweapon but as part of China's attempt to demonstrate that its efforts to identify and combat viruses are equal to or greater than the capabilities of the United States."
So not only did the Chinese Communist Party lie to the world about the scope and severity of the coronavirus as it let the virus spread across the globe, but it is now also increasingly possible that the coronavirus emerged only as a result of Chinese leaders' insecurities and their failure to heed American security warnings about the safe handling of viruses.
Even without the coronavirus crisis, we already knew that China murders its own citizens in concentration camps, steals American intellectual property, sustains the worst dictatorships in the world, suppresses dissidents, and has generally claimed the mantle of the world's anti-democracy activism. Trump should have never had to rely on economic fallacies about trade to convince the country to shut out China. A moral argument should have been enough.
But now, there's a human cost — a death toll that could end up in the millions. Punishing China and making it pay should become a bipartisan effort taken up enthusiastically. And yet the Democratic Party's recalcitrance to join Trump may cost Biden the election.
Contrary to Trump's trope of "Beijing Biden," it would be politically easy and expedient for the former vice president to prove that he, too, is a China hawk. For starters, Biden made headlines when he rightly slammed Bernie Sanders for his Sinosycophancy. Biden's policy proposals have been more hawkish than the party line during the Obama administration, and he could take advantage of this. He said that he'd renegotiate the anti-China Trans-Pacific Partnership to further strengthen its power over China, and his climate change proposal would specifically hold Chinese carbon emissions to account.
Sure, Biden has said some questionable things about China too. But Trump regularly tweets praise for Xi Jinping right now. It's not as though either one has been flawless in this regard.
So Biden could easily buck up and say, "Trump may have botched the early coronavirus response, and I would certainly do better, but let's not forget that China must be made to pay for starting this crisis in the first place." After all, he's toed that line previously:
The coronavirus is not Donald Trump's fault, but his inept response is.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) March 27, 2020
He ignored the warnings for months, downplayed the threat it posed, and failed to take the action needed to combat the outbreak.
It's one of the greatest failures of presidential leadership in our history.
But that only works if the Democratic Party lets him. And right now, Trump is baiting Democrats into minimizing China's responsibility. Top Democrats are taking the bait.
Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton excoriated Trump for threatening to defund the Beijing-bootlicking World Health Organization. Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, went as far as to completely absolve China of any culpability.
"The reason that we're in the crisis that we are today is not because of anything that China did. It's not because of anything the WHO did," Murphy said to CNN's Anderson Cooper. "It's because of what this president did."
This isn't just evil. It's politically moronic. Democratic Party leaders may be fine making a deal with the devil, but their voters aren't.
In January, Morning Consult found that registered voters who disapprove of Trump were actually less likely to consider China friendly or an ally. Both a majority of those approving of Trump and those disapproving of him consider China either unfriendly or an enemy, with 1 in 5 respondents overall considering it the latter. And that's before China even shut down the planet.
It shouldn't be a partisan issue to want to punish the murderous dictatorship that allowed a pandemic to ravage the world. But Democrats might just let it become so.
