THE PARTISAN CORONAVIRUS BLAME GAME escalated over the weekend with the release of a blistering attack ad and a number of media appearances in which lawmakers sought to color the public’s perception of how we arrived at 40,000 coronavirus fatalities and who should be held responsible at the polls in November.
The Biden campaign released an attack ad on Saturday that will run online in the battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, North Carolina and Florida. “When Trump rolled over for the Chinese, he took their word for it. Trump praised the Chinese 15 times in January and February as the coronavirus spread across the world,” the narrator says as images of Trump tweets and quotes appear on screen. The ad is the first major salvo in Biden’s efforts to cast the Trump campaign as woefully unprepared to meet the moment. For the next six months we can expect Biden to talk of little else.
On January 31, the day the White House announced that it would bar foreign nationals who had visited China in the previous two weeks from entering the U.S., Biden accused Trump of responding to the crisis with “hysterical xenophobia.” The Biden campaign later came out in favor of the travel restriction and now says the xenophobia remark was not made in reference to that specific decision.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also entered the fray on Sunday, slamming the administration’s efforts during an appearance on Fox News Sundays with Chris Wallace. “The president gets an F, a failure, on the testing,” Pelosi said. Wallace responded by charging Pelosi with hypocrisy, citing her decision to take a walking tour of San Francisco’s Chinatown in late February, three weeks after Trump announced the China travel restrictions. Following the tour, Pelosi held a press conference to assure her cons uents that “everything is fine” and urged them to “come to Chinatown.”
“If the president underplayed the threat in the early days, Speaker Pelosi, didn’t you as well?” Wallace asked.
“No!” Pelosi replied. “What we were trying to do is end the discrimination, the stigma that was going out against the Asian-American community and in fact, if you will look, the record will show that our Chinatown has been a model of containing and preventing the virus, and I’m confident in our folks there and thought it was necessary to offset some of the things that the president and others were saying about Asian-Americans and making them a target. A target of violence across the country.”
Representative Dan Crenshaw offered a word in defense of the administration during a Friday appearance on Real Time With Bill Maher. The Texas Republican pushed back on Maher’s claim that the administration was slow to respond to the outbreak relative to other countries, and argued that many of the same people who criticized Trump’s China travel ban in February are now criticizing him for not being more restrictive.
“He lies about that,” Maher said, pointing out that some 40,000 travelers entered the country from China after the restrictions were put in place — the same line of attack featured in Biden’s campaign ad. “He said he stopped people coming in from China and he did not.”
“Look, let me address that,” Crenshaw said. “These were U.S. citizens and passport holders and green card holders being repatriated — U.S. citizens. So, you have to make the argument then that we shouldn’t allow them in. It sounds to me like you’re fully agreeing with President Trump on this when everybody else disagreed with him. And if you’re saying that you wish that travel restriction had been more extreme, okay fine, you apparently had the foresight when nobody else did.”
With the exception of Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) and a handful of China hawks in the House, everyone on Capitol Hill and in the administration was slow to realize the scale of the threat facing America and the world. This universal lack of preparedness was in no small part due to the fact that our elected leaders were taking their cues from a World Health Organization that was parroting the Beijing party line. Considering the monumental level of spin Americans are about to be subjected to, it’s worth remembering who said what and when.