Media undercuts Trump on China
IT’S not trouble enough that President Trump is engaged in a tense, multifront struggle with China. He also must guard his back from attacks by elements of the American media. Tuesday provided a memorable example.
With a World Health Organization meeting dominated by the coronavirus, a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry issued a belligerent, threatening statement. The spokesman, Zhao Lijian, told reporters in Beijing:
“The United States has made a miscalculation and found the wrong target when it picks on China, shirks its responsibilities and bargains on how to fulfill its international obligations to the World Health Organization.”
In its report of those remarks, The New York Times used this headline: “China hits back, in words and aid pledges, as America goes at it alone.” It went on to accuse Trump of threatening “isolationism.”
See, China “hits back” means America started it. And “isolationism” suggests it’s the US against the world, when, in fact, 122 nations favored a probe into the Chinese origins of the virus and its human-to-human transmission.
Even conceding the American media’s hatred of Trump, you might assume the deaths and devastation caused by the coronavirus would at least lead them to view China’s denials of any wrongdoing with suspicion. If you made that assumption, you would be naive — and wrong.
For the left, Trump and America are to blame. That’s where they begin and that’s where they end.
William Safire, the late, great Times columnist, labeled those who engage in national self-hating as “blame-America-firsters.” I can only imagine what Safire, a staunch anti-Communist, would think as his former employer leads the pack to undercut an American president in a battle with the ruling Chinese Communist Party.
It’s true that Trump too often engages in gratuitous feuds with the White House press corps and has a knack for getting into mud battles when he should rise above them. One effect of those seemingly endless skirmishes is that the public gets weary and tunes out the very important battles Trump is fighting.
None is more critical for our nation’s security than his willingness to confront China — despite media backstabbing.
No other living Republican would dare to face off with China if it meant also standing up to the Times, The Washington Post, CNN and the establishment of both parties. If anyone else were president, China would not have renegotiated the trade deals and it would get away with causing the most deadly pandemic in a century. And were it not for Trump, the WHO still would be a revered institution instead of being unmasked as China’s gofer.
Indeed, it is only the United States’ leadership — and that means Trump — that gives all those other countries the backbone even to demand an investigation. Otherwise, they would fold in the face of the threats that Chinese leaders routinely issue to anyone who dares question whether the outbreak could have been stopped.
In that context, Trump’s Monday letter to the UN health organization lays out a compelling timeline not only of China’s attempts to silence its own scientists, but also of the complicity of WHO officials. The two worked with one goal — to absolve China and protect its reputation.
The organization’s praise of China’s “transparency” was a pure Baghdad Bob moment, as was its claim in January that there was “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.”
Only instead of laughs, those and other false and misleading claims gave the killer virus a head start on its global march. At least 321,000 people have died so far, more than 91,000 of them in the United States. And the world economy is smoking rubble.
Trump concludes his four-page letter with a demand that the organization begin to reform itself within 30 days and demonstrate its independence from China. Otherwise, he vows that the temporary suspension of American dollars will become permanent and that the US will consider withdrawing altogether.
American taxpayers gave nearly $900 million to the organization during 2018 and 2019, 10 times more than China’s $86 million.
Although the membership passed a resolution Tuesday creating an “impartial, independent and comprehensive evaluation” into the world response to the virus, including by the WHO, the likelihood that it will find China or the organization guilty of serious misconduct is small. To make sure he will get the outcome he wants, China President Xi Jinping announced that his nation would donate $2 billion to the WHO over the next two years.
That’s the new China way, of course — using money to buy silence and acceptance of its dominance. It works with governments around the world and with American universities, businesses and lobbyists.
At the same time, The Wall Street Journal in a Tuesday report showed that China is ready to use the stick as well as the carrot. The article cited example after example of Chinese diplomats around the world using aggressive language and actions to advance their nation’s global power.
The Journal called them “Wolf Warrior” diplomats who have thrown off polite habits and routinely engage in public spats with political leaders over even minor issues. The pandemic has been a
sore spot in numerous places, and the paper reports that the Chinese embassy in Venezuela berated local lawmakers who called it the “China coronavirus.”
The embassy said the Venezuelans were suffering from a “political virus” and advised them to “wear the masks and shut up.”
This is the China America must contend with. Thankfully, Trump is hellbent on doing it, even as our nation’s media elites are determined to undercut him.