The US president is coaching his supporters into thinking he is just doing his best with a problem that someone else created.
Donald Trump loves a nickname.
He has recently and very purposefully ramped up his reference to “Chinese virus”. It’s not a phrase you’ll hear from medical experts or anyone else on the Trump administration’s coronavirus task force.
The US president has disregarded criticism that the term is racially loaded or inaccurate when describing a global pandemic.
In the past couple of days, he’s been repeatedly using the phrase on Twitter. He addressed those who’ve lost their jobs because of the “onslaught of the Chinese virus”.
He then tweeted he would be holding a news conference “concerning the Chinese virus” adding he had “always treated the Chinese virus very seriously” despite having repeatedly downplayed what he once called a hoax. Advertisement
Before Monday, he’d been calling it the coronavirus – so why the shift? There has been another recent change in Mr Trump’s tone.
He is now taking this public health crisis seriously. He accepted it could cause a recession and its grip on America could last well into the summer which is just a couple of months from November’s election.
Alongside the realisation of how grave this situation is, Mr Trump seems to have reached an awareness that the buck stops with him. If millions of Americans die, it will be on his watch.
Calling it the ‘Chinese virus’ is a way of deflecting blame.
Mr Trump is coaching his supporters into thinking he is just doing his best with a problem someone else created.