During CNN’s State of the Union this Sunday morning, the clown show of the Trump administration reached a new height when top Trump adviser Peter Navarro suggested that Chinese authorities may have purposefully created the Coronavirus, presumably as some kind of weapon against the United States. That claim is absolutely unhinged, tinfoil hat-level, paranoid nonsense — but it’s coming from a longtime top adviser to the president of the United States who has stuck around through the departures of many top officials. There is absolutely no apparent evidence supporting Navarro’s assessment of the situation.
Navarro ranted:
‘The Chinese Communist Party did tremendous damage to this society and this economy. I mean last night, they tore down statues of Ulysses S. Grant and Francis Scott Key, and it’s like, what is going on in this country? And it’s all tied up in, I think, a lot of pent-up frustration about what’s going on in this world. And so my job is to help create jobs for this president, and we’ve got a long road ahead of us.’
Host Jake Tapper subsequently seized on the fact that Navarro had described the effects of the Coronavirus pandemic as the work of the Chinese Communist Party against the United States. Tapper asked:
‘Did you say China created this virus? Did I hear you wrong?’
And, staggeringly, Navarro did not fundamentally dispute the point. He insisted that the virus is a “product” of China, explaining:
‘You did not hear me wrong. That virus was a product of the Chinese Communist Party, and until we get some information about what happened in those labs and what happened at that wet market, we know that that virus was spawned in China. That is what I mean. Spawned in China.’
Tapper asked if he thinks the virus was “purposely created,” and Navarro added:
‘That’s an open question, but I’ll tell you this: in 2006, in a book I wrote, called The Coming China Wars, on page 150, I predicted that China would create a viral pandemic that could possibly kill millions. Why did I do that at the time? Because the whole structure of that authoritarian, repressive, non-transparent society is geared towards giving us exactly what they’ve given us, which is a pandemic.’
Watch below:
Jake Tapper: Did I just hear you say China created this virus?
Peter Navarro: You did not hear me wrong. That virus was a product of the Chinese Communist Party.
Tapper: But you think it was purposely created?
Navarro: That is an open question. pic.twitter.com/gv4FBa2M0W
— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) June 21, 2020
It is laughably ridiculous that Navarro’s justification for his outrageous claim that China may have created the Coronavirus is something that he himself wrote over a decade ago. That is an amazing feat of circular reasoning. He’s trying to insist, basically, that his questioning is credible because he says so — and that’s the extent of his argument.
When this nonsense is what a top presidential adviser is spewing on national television, how can Americans expect the president to lead any sort of remotely effective response to the Coronavirus?
During a weekend rally in Oklahoma, Trump even quipped that he’d supposedly asked administration officials to dial down testing in an effort to keep overall Coronavirus case numbers down. A White House official claimed that Trump was “clearly joking,” as reporter Michael Bender put it.
Re: this joke: 121,000 Americans have died so far from coronavirus.
— Michael C. Bender (@MichaelCBender) June 21, 2020
