“This is their new hoax.” On a clear evening in the North Charleston Coliseum, Donald Trump spoke to thousands of supporters the day before South Carolina’s primary, hoping to fire up voters and stoke resentment against Democrats and the media. Since the December 2019 emergence of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) in Wuhan, China, a new conflict has brewed on the sidelines of the panic. Republican and right-wing news has taken up the banner of defense for Trump, making the case that the coronavirus is a scandal seized upon and manipulated by Democrats, transformed into a campaign to smear the president.
At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Friday, February 28, Mick Mulvaney (at the time, acting White House Chief of Staff) spoke to a crowd of powerful right-wingers, attempting to paint Democrats and the media as hysterical and opportunistic. According to Mulvaney, “they think this is going to be what brings down the President. That’s what this is all about.”
Never unsupported, Mulvaney and Trump have been consistently bolstered in their claims by Fox News. On Feb. 28, Donald Trump Jr. was brought onto Fox & Friends as a commentator, griping that Democrats “hope that it comes here and kills millions of people so that it can end Donald Trump’s streak of winning” in “a new level of sickness.” Seconds later, Trump Jr. doubled down on President Trump’s claim that the recent drops in the stock market – something admittedly deemed an electoral concern for Trump – are due to “socialist and communist” policies floated by Democratic primary candidates in televised debates, such as plans for single-payer healthcare and tuition-free public college. He went on to say, “you’ve seen them pray for a disaster…so they can own Trump.” Others within Fox News have complained about this supposed symptom of “Trump derangement syndrome.” Ainsley Earhardt, a weekday host of Fox & Friends, and Pete Hegseth, an informal advisor to Donald Trump, commiserated on the show later that “Democrats are cheering for a virus because they hate Donald Trump so much.”
Lest anyone dismiss the coverage as merely a squabble contained within Fox News, Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), along with Steve Bannon of Breitbart, has embraced a conspiracy theory that COVID-19 was engineered as a bioweapon in a high-security biolab in Wuhan, which happens to be in close proximity to a seafood and live animal market in the city. It is worth noting that the coronavirus would make a horrible bioweapon. The fatality rate quoted by the World Health Organization (WHO) as 3.4 percent. With the majority of cases and deaths occurring in China, COVID-19 is most menacing to those already physically vulnerable, such as the elderly and those with previously weakened immune systems. It’s implausible that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would create the virus, which has effectively brought the Chinese government to a standstill and mainly affected its own citizens.
On February 24, Rush Limbaugh, who was recently awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, downplayed the threat of the virus on his radio show, drawing an equivalency with the “common cold,” and announcing that Dr. Nancy Messonier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, is part of the “deep state” for her acknowledgment of the virus’s inevitable spread. Also during the show, Limbaugh added, “Just keep in mind where the coronavirus came from. It came from a country that Bernie Sanders wants to turn the United States into a mirror image of: Communist China.”
Rush Limbaugh is not Donald Trump. But Donald Trump, who has nakedly endorsed and rewarded the right-wing media, including Limbaugh in the most literal way possible, has unmistakably joined hands with them in order to defend his own dangerously faltering handling of the outbreak. According to an article from the New York Times, in an effort to minimize fears about the spreading of the virus in the U.S., Trump has been reluctant to officially acknowledge a number of cases of Americans with COVID-19, including one instance where he stated that “he would prefer not to let 3,533 people on a cruise ship held off the coast of San Francisco to disembark onto American soil, even if they were placed into quarantine, in part because it would inflate the number of American infections.”
The combination of this inept response supported by the right-wing media machine has only weaponized the situation, making it still more volatile. Not only have the administration’s unpredictable and tangled actions hurt Americans, it will continue to pose a danger to both those in the U.S. and around the world. The U.S. government should be undertaking a complex effort to coordinate between agencies that do not typically work closely, but instead is bolstering a narrative that picks a fight with Democrats, and points an accusatory and antagonistic finger at China. Amidst a festering trade war, both countries could stand to build trust, not stoke the flames. At the true center of the suffering are the victims of the illness, and Democrats and Republicans alike should be concerned with expressing compassion and professionalism. While China has been criticized for its lack of transparency, speed, and integrity in addressing the outbreak, there is no excuse for the U.S., or any wing of the American media, to follow suit.
