https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/15/trump-china-coronavirus-188736
The president has lambasted the WHO for accepting Beijing’s assurances about the outbreak, but he repeated them, as well.
Wednesday, May 20, 2020
'We've been muzzled': CDC sources say White House putting politics ahead of science
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/20/politics/coronavirus-travel-alert-cdc-white-house-tensions-invs/index.html
In interviews with CNN, CDC officials
say their agency's efforts to mount a coordinated response to the
Covid-19 pandemic have been hamstrung by a White House whose decisions
are driven by politics rather than science.
Donald Trump's WHO Letter About China Explained: An Annotated Timeline
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-who-letter-china-explained-annotated-timeline-1505379
President Donald Trump wrote this week a letter to the World Health
Organization (WHO) chief Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus criticizing the
U.N. agency and his leadership during the coronavirus pandemic,
specifically its work with China, where the outbreak first emerged.
Here, Newsweek presents Trump's letter to the WHO in full,
along with annotations to add context, facts, counterclaims, and other
relevant information.
Observers have warned that the loss of U.S. funding would degrade the
WHO's ability to prepare for and fight future pandemics. Philanthropist
billionaire Bill Gates, himself a major funder of the organization,
said Trump's threat is "as dangerous as it sounds."
I was right, says prof who predicted pandemic would play itself out in 70 days
https://www.timesofisrael.com/i-was-right-says-prof-who-predicted-pandemic-would-play-itself-out-in-70-days/
Isaac Ben-Israel says virus disappears everywhere at same speed, rendering interventions irrelevant. Public health expert: He ‘has no clue about epidemiology and public health’
Many medical professionals have raised their
eyebrows over Ben-Israel’s claims. The public health expert Nadav
Davidovitch, asked to comment for this article, said he agrees with
Ben-Israel’s sentiment that “hysteria” must be avoided but added: “He is
an excellent scientist, yet he has no clue about epidemiology and
public health.”
Ben-Israel doesn’t have a medical
background, but claimed that simple mathematics can yield an
understanding of the virus’s pattern. He argued that this pattern proves
that lockdowns are “unnecessary no matter what,” and have been a
needless disruption to life and a waste of money.
Ben-Israel has supported social distancing and hygiene measures but
said that they only have a limited impact on infection rates. He argued
that this is now shown to be true because he can’t draw a clear
correlation between a country’s hygiene level and a significant change
in the pattern of infection rates.Trump Is Dangerously Predictable With China
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/05/01/trump-xi-china-coronavirus-trade-deal/
However erratic Trump’s positions on China appear at the surface, an
honest examination of his engagement with Beijing reveals not
unpredictability but a dangerous steadfastness. Trump has consistently
placed his personal political interests over the national interest of
the United States—even when the stakes couldn’t be higher.
Nor has Trump been shy about brandishing the trade deal as a pillar
of his reelection campaign. Just before its signing, Trump crowed about
the deal—describing it as a “big, beautiful monster”—at a campaign rally in the swing state of Ohio. During the signing ceremony itself, he declared: “It just doesn’t get any bigger than this.” Trump’s campaign, moreover, was planning
a series of television ads touting the deal, whose signing and
implementation spanned the exact period when America’s coronavirus
trajectory was taking shape. It was precisely during this period when
the dialogue between Washington and Beijing could have benefited from
less fawning and more calls for transparency and international
cooperation. But for Trump himself, the trade deal and its political
implications didn’t “get any bigger,” and not even public health
concerns could push him to jeopardize his rapport with Xi to secure it.
Other developments in Trump’s relations with Beijing that seem
erratic on the surface display the same predictable, one-track mindset.
This includes Trump’s protection of the Chinese telecommunications firm
ZTE against his own officials in the Department of Commerce. In March
2017, ZTE pleaded guilty in the United States to illegally exporting
American technology to Iran and North Korea. A year later, when the firm
violated the settlement agreement with the U.S. court, the Department
of Commerce banned
American companies from providing ZTE with technology for seven years.
The ruling underscored the national security implications of ZTE’s
original offenses, its disregard for the settlement agreement, and the
company’s efforts to cover up that disregard.
Trump upended this course of action in May 2018, when he abruptly tweeted
about how he was working with Xi to get ZTE “back into business,”
citing “[t]oo many jobs in China lost” and directing the Commerce
Department to “get it done.” The U.S. president’s focus on unemployed
Chinese—after railing against Beijing’s unfair economic practices for
years—raised eyebrows and sowed confusion even within his own administration.
Trump owed tens of millions to Bank of China
https://www.politico.eu/article/trump-owes-tens-of-millions-to-the-bank-of-china-and-the-loan-is-due-soon/
Donald Trump is warning “China will own the United States” if Joe Biden is elected president.
But Trump himself has taken on debt from China. In 2012, his real
estate partner refinanced one of Trump’s most prized New York buildings
for almost $1 billion. The debt included $211 million from the
state-owned Bank of China, which matures in the middle of what could be
Trump’s second term.
Donald Trump’s Debt to China
With criticisms of Trump’s handling of the pandemic growing and new
opinion polls showing him trailing Biden in several key battleground
states, we are sure to see more of these diversions. But adopting a
China campaign strategy would also present a number of problems for
Trump, beginning with the fact that Hunter Biden’s investment
partnership isn’t the only American business that received funding from
Chinese entities. In 2012, the Bank of China, a commercial bank owned by
the Chinese state, provided more than two hundred million dollars in
loans to a New York office building that Trump co-owns, Politico reported on Friday. The loans will come due in 2022, “in the middle of what could be Trump’s second term,” the timely article noted.
Trumplomacy: What's behind new US strategy on China?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52506073
Mr Trump's allies in the America First Action (AFA) political
committee have been rolling out advertisements lashing "Beijing Biden"
for "leading the charge" of a Washington elite too willing to
accommodate a predatory China.
Mr Biden has hit back with an
advert that accuses the president of trying to deflect blame for his own
slow response to the pandemic, and of being too trusting of China's
initial information about the virus.
The common element in these
starkly different positions is that both campaigns believe it's good
politics to argue their man will be strongest in taking on Beijing.
"If
you look at the most recent Pew poll and Gallup poll, Americans'
distrust of China, whether you're Republican or Democrat, is at an
all-time high," roughly two-thirds of the country, says the AFA's Kelly
Sadler. "This is a universal issue that Republicans and Democrats can
both agree on."
There's certainly been a dramatic uptick in negative views of China since Mr Trump took office and dialled up the trade war.
Donald Trump’s erratic China policy undermines western unity
https://www.ft.com/content/b9a063aa-9057-11ea-9207-ace009a12028
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The broader difficulty is that America’s allies fear that the Trump administration’s goal is not to compel China to follow international rules — an aim they would support — but to destroy the rules. The allies know that the White House has pulled the US out of the Paris climate accord, the Iran nuclear deal and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and is deliberately hobbling both the World Trade Organization and the World Health Organization. They remember that the president has threatened to impose tariffs on Germany and Japan — and has expressed scepticism about Nato and hostility towards the EU. They also know that Mr Trump is up for re-election in November, and suspect his motives in going after China now.
The broader difficulty is that America’s allies fear that the Trump administration’s goal is not to compel China to follow international rules — an aim they would support — but to destroy the rules. The allies know that the White House has pulled the US out of the Paris climate accord, the Iran nuclear deal and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and is deliberately hobbling both the World Trade Organization and the World Health Organization. They remember that the president has threatened to impose tariffs on Germany and Japan — and has expressed scepticism about Nato and hostility towards the EU. They also know that Mr Trump is up for re-election in November, and suspect his motives in going after China now.
The sad truth is that America’s allies in Europe and Asia are also
angered by Beijing’s behaviour. They simply do not trust the Trump
administration’s leadership in countering it.
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