David Goldman | On April 29, 2020

The White House – North Lawn and Entrance – Washington, DC.

“Trump Says China May Be ‘Knowingly Responsible’ for Virus,” Bloomberg’s Mario Parker misreported the president’s April 18 press briefing. Trump made no such accusation; rather, he said that he would be angry if China had released the coronavirus deliberately. His statement was clearly hypothetical, and the president believed that China had delayed reporting of the Covid-19 epidemic out of embarrassment, not malice. “I think they were embarrassed,” Trump told a reporter at the Saturday White House press briefing. “I think they knew it was something bad and I think they were embarrassed. But you know, no, I think we’re doing very well.”

A day earlier, Trump claimed that China had underreported its Covid-19 death toll, and said the origin of the virus was under investigation. “If it was a mistake, a mistake is a mistake. But if they were knowingly responsible, yeah, then there should be consequences,” the president said. By “mistake,” Trump referred to the widely-circulated rumor that the virus had leaked from a government virology laboratory in Wuhan. The president’s carefully crafted formulation makes no official reproach to Beijing, while allowing some of his supporters to claim that China either instigated the epidemic by creating a biological weapon, or aggravated the crisis by deliberately withholding information from the West.

Politically that’s a win-win situation for the US president. By a 54-46 margins, Americans told the Harris Poll in early April that “China should be required to pay for the spread of the virus, while 72% said they thought China’s reporting of the impact of the epidemic was inaccurate. A Pew Survey found that 30% of Americans believe the virus was invented in laboratory. By leaving the door open to a popular conspiracy theory, Trump keeps his base motivated, although he insists that China acted in error. As the president said, “A mistake is a mistake.” It’s Virology Apprentice, expertly calibrated to serve diplomatic as well as campaign goals.

Senior administration officials meanwhile rejected the theory that China had engineered the Covid-19 virus. Defense Secretary Mike Espers told a television interviewer Thursday that “a majority of the views right now is that it is natural, it is organic.” On Friday, Trump’s top medical spokesman Anthony Fauci told a press briefing, “A group of highly-qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences in bats as they evolve. The mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.” Fauci evidently was referring to a study by Scripps Research, a respected California laboratory.

David Goldman