David Frum, The Atlantic: “Two questions have dominated politics throughout the coronavirus pandemic. Democrats and public-health experts have asked: What should we do? Former President Donald Trump, for his part, minimized the need to act. He instead spoke incessantly about a very different question: Whom should we blame? ‘In recent months, our nation and the world has been hit by the once-in-a-century pandemic that China allowed to spread around the globe. They could have stopped it, but they allowed it to come out,’ Trump said as he accepted the Republican Party’s nomination in August 2020. ‘It’s China’s fault. It should have never happened,’ he said at a presidential debate with Joe Biden in September 2020. ‘We built the greatest economy in the world; it was horribly interrupted by something that should have never happened, came in from China – the plague. The plague from China,’ he said on Fox and Friends on the morning of Election Day.”
“There are hundreds of similar examples from the president and his inner circle. In November 2020, a solid majority of American voters decided that the first of the two questions – What should we do? – was more urgent, and that Biden and his party offered the better answer. But now that Biden’s administration is succeeding at bringing the pandemic under control within the United States, Trump’s preferred alternative question – Whom should we blame? – is reclaiming attention.”
“Trump’s question was of course, from the beginning, politically motivated. He and his supporters hoped that if enough Americans blamed China for creating the problem, that blame would somehow exonerate Trump from so callously mismanaging it. More than that: Trump and his supporters hoped that if enough Americans blamed China for creating the problem, they would agree that he ranked as its most pitiable victim. As Gabriel Sherman reported for Vanity Fair in May 2020: As he headed into Memorial Day weekend… ‘He was just in a fucking rage,’ said a person who spoke with Trump late last week. ‘He was saying, ‘This is so unfair to me! Everything was going great. We were cruising to reelection!’ The public’s rejection of Trump’s attempt to deploy blame as an excuse does not, however, make the question go away.”