US blame game plotted for election
Republicans wage campaign at expense of thousands of US lives: experts
Diverting popular attention from a catastrophic US government failure in handling COVID-19 and adopting hardline rhetoric against China top the Republican Party’s misguided and ultimately flawed agenda to win back voters for the November elections, Chinese analysts said on Tuesday.
The experts noted that the Trump administration’s strategies include scapegoating China, threatening a renewed trade war and floating coronavirus conspiracies in a campaign of accusations to achieve political goals that come at the expense of thousands of American lives.
Tensions between the two largest economies in the world have escalated as the Republicans pass the buck to misdirect the American public and treat China as an enemy by crafting opinions to serve their own interests.
As US President Donald Trump continued elevating China’s “culpability” for the epidemic, his administration is also reportedly mulling an initiative to remove global industrial supply chains from China and weighing new tariffs to renew a trade war.
Part of the US-initiated trade war strategy under Trump is reportedly reducing US reliance on China and urging companies to move their production out of the country.
However, such whole government push came along at the time when Washington has been engaging in a so-called new Cold War with Beijing as American hawks constantly criticized China for what they said downplaying the impact of the COVID-19 and politicians like US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo insisted on groundless accusations that the virus originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, Central China’s Hubei Province.
“It is absolutely based on electioneering,” Tom Fowdy, a British political and international relations analyst and a graduate of Durham and Oxford universities, told the Global Times on Tuesday.
The Trump administration long prized the economy as its greatest achievement and in a matter of weeks this has been completely wiped out by the COVID-19 pandemic, with the US facing its biggest slump since the Great Depression.
“The administration has nothing else left to go on but to fan the flames of nationalist anger against China.”
While Washington blamed Beijing for delaying response to the COVID-19, more evidences emerged showing that the misconduct of the US government would be too big to conceal.
After US media reported that a woman died from the COVID-19 on February 6 in California, Michael Melham, mayor of Belleville of New Jersey, said he tested positive for coronavirus antibodies and believed he was sick with the virus in November – more than a month before doctors in China first reported cases of the new disease.
While some reports suggested the Trump team was now working to make the 2020 presidential campaign a race between Democrats and Republicans to see who would adopt a tougher stance on China, Chinese analysts suggested there are growing uncertainties as the US society has become more divided when the pandemic worsens.
The US and its economy suffered the most severe contraction in more than a decade in the first quarter.
To gain support from those voters in swing states, Trump needs to effectively contain the pandemic by November, which would become a crucial factor in influencing his re-election, analysts said.