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Friday 1 May 2020 10:29
Donald Trump has claimed he has seen evidence indicating that the coronavirus originated in a medical laboratory in Wuhan, China, and may have been released on the world by “mistake” while threatening to slap a new round of tariffs on the rival superpower he continues to blame for the outbreak.
The president’s conspiracy theorising was branded “yet another distraction” and the latest in his “endless flurry of lies” by pundits, as he also teased reinstating disgraced general Michael Flynn after calling the FBI “dirty cops” for investigating him and pressured Democratic challenger Joe Biden to come clean on a sexual assault allegation against him.
Meanwhile, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer’s decision to extend lockdown measures led armed right-wing protesters to storm the State House in Lansing in alarming scenes that quickly went viral as the public’s patience in quarantine is severely tested.
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Trump served up more blind optimism yesterday, failing to read the room when he declared of a crisis that has already claimed the lives of more than 60,000 Americans: “Our death totals, our numbers per million people, are really very very strong.”
If that sounded a little off, tonally, here are his thoughts on national unity: “The Republican-run states are in strong shape… Republicans are in a much better position, I don’t want to use the word ‘negotiating position’ but we are.”
So much for calls from Mike Pence and others on the right not to politicise the recovery effort.
But he insisted he had compassion for the public he has so emphatically failed to reach out to or commiserate with: “I don’t think anybody could feel any worse than I do about all of the death and destruction that is so needless. Nobody… Nobody is thinking about it more.”
Ha! Those comments came after he’d spent much of the day lashing out at the FBI over their past investigations into Roger Stone and Michael Flynn, accusing the bureau of “corruption” and branding its former director James Comey “A DIRTY COP!”
Asked about whether he would reinstate Flynn – who was fired as Trump’s first national security adviser in early 2017 after just 24 days in office for lying to the Feds and to VP Pence about his international consultancy commitments – the president said he would “certainly consider it”, presumably to vindicate his decision to appoint the general in the first place.
John T Bennett has more on this.
Trump claims to have seen ‘evidence’ coronavirus engineered in Wuhan lab
Donald Trump has claimed he has seen evidence indicating that the coronavirus originated in a medical laboratory in Wuhan, China, and may have been released on the world by “mistake” while threatening to slap a new round of tariffs on the rival superpower he continues to blame for the outbreak.
Speaking at the White House at an event in the East Room nominally about his administration’s efforts to aid seniors during the shutdown, Trump said: “It’s a terrible thing that happened.
“Whether they made a mistake or whether it started off as a mistake and then they made another one, or did somebody do something on purpose.”
“Certainly it could have been stopped,” he continued. “They either couldn’t do it from a competence standpoint, or they let it spread… It got loose, let’s say, and they could have capped it.”
The Chinese government has said that any claims that the coronavirus was released from a laboratory are “unfounded and purely fabricated out of nothing”.
The country’s foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said: “I would like to point out again that the origin of the virus is a complex scientific issue and it should be studied by scientists and professionals.
Shuang criticised those in the US who say China should be held accountable for the global pandemic, saying they should spend their time on “better controlling the epidemic situation at home”.
Trump also used the session to again insist Beijing is invested in stopping his re-election and to claim he stopped praising the country as soon as the virus hit the US, which is simply not so, as the tweet below from late March indicates:
The president’s conspiracy theorising was branded “yet another distraction” by former FBI general counsel Andrew Weissman following on from several days of Trump lashing out at the media and the bureau for its investigations of several of his allies.
Writer Kurt Eichenwald went even further, branding Trump’s latest target in his search for a scapegoat just part of the “endless flurry of lies” he engages in.
Here’s John T Bennett’s report.
Hello and welcome to The Independent‘s rolling coverage of the coronavirus outbreak in the US and the Donald Trump administration’s response to it.
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