If Trump could insist Mexico would pay for the wall, he can say China will pay for the coronavirus. The obvious fact that neither is going to happen is immaterial to their value as nationalistic campaign slogans. jonathanchait writes
Photo: AP/Shutterstock During the run-up to the Iraq war, the Bush administration pressured intelligence agencies to support its preferred conclusion that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction. Since Iraq was a totalitarian state that had resisted international demands for transparency, its behavior provoked suspicion that both encouraged Bush administration officials to suspect the worst and made their manipulation of intelligence appear more plausible.
The bulk of scientific evidence points to a different conclusion — that the coronavirus was transmitted from animals to humans. The lab theory remains theoretically possible but unlikely and difficult to prove. Conservatives have obsessed over the lab theory for strange reasons.
The answer is, fortunately, much more ridiculous than it was under the Bush administration. Trump wants to “set the stage for holding China responsible” and is interested in suing China for damages. The Washington Post has a dedicated story on the administration’s plans to pursue a lawsuit or seek reparations.
The Post story runs through various options for getting paid by China being floated by Trump officials. The closest thing to a feasible option would be repudiating debt held by China, though the blowback to that move would be so enormous — other potential buyers of Treasury bills would be demanding higher interest rates forever — that this would be more like an act of financial self-harm than the collection of reparations.
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