Trump stops discussion of Chinese virus after Xi Jinping deep ego massage

We didn’t notice it because we finally stopped watching Donald Trump’s daily coronavirus rallies, but the dear leader has apparently stopped talking about COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus” in recent days, and d ‘Other parts of the administration have started calling the disease by its real name too. According to a report today from the Daily Beast, this change has nothing to do with a desire for medical accuracy, or with concern about threats against Asian Americans from Trumpers who insist that the epidemic be called buy its real name: “Wuhan virus because that’s where it came from, it’s not stupid racist.” No, White House sources said Trump had a phone call last week with Chinese President Xi Jinping, who deployed “one of the most effective diplomatic maneuvers of the current American era: aggressive flattery”.

My God, there is an amazing development that no one could have seen coming.

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In a phone call to discuss the international health crisis last week, Xi told Trump how decisive, strong and effective he believed his US counterpart’s economic and public health responses said two American officials knowing the matter.

An unnamed “senior administration official” looks a bit like Donald Trump describing how outsiders have always taken advantage of “weak” American leaders in the past, said:

For a long time, the President experienced an epic bromance with Xi […] If I were them, I would do the same. Why wouldn’t you try to take advantage of this relationship with a [U.S.] president who goes on TV so many times to say how much he thinks your guy [Xi] East.

The gain seems to have been immediate, because Trump likes to be loved, is it that bad? Especially if that love comes from a strong, authoritarian man like the one Trump wants to be. Trump has moved from “defining the pandemic as a war whose origins were in China” to considerably more accommodating positions.

But lately, he has softened his tone and taken a more deferential stance towards Xi, whom he regularly calls his good “friend” and an “amazing guy” who does everything he can to compliment and apologize Beijing for its response to the virus, and even to publicly ignore new reports on China’s disinformation apparatus in the midst of the pandemic.

Trump has also told several officials in recent days that Xi has assured him that the Chinese government will not lie about the number of reported cases of coronavirus currently emerging from the epicenter of the epidemic, Wuhan, two sources familiar with the comments said.

Hey, if a foreign leader tells him something, it must be true, unless he is one of our stupid allies. By the way, the Wall Street newspaper reports today that the Chinese authorities have decided not to include more than 1,500 people infected with the coronavirus in their last case count, because they had no symptoms. Don’t worry, Chinese health officials say, as these people and their “close contacts” were still to be quarantined for two weeks, although Newspaper note: “We could not know to what extent this was done.” In any case, a senior health official now says that he will start including asymptomatic cases in his totals in the future, trust them.

“It does not matter if they are not included in the count of confirmed cases,” Zeng Guang, chief epidemiologist at the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told an information magazine. “The key question is whether these people have been restricted.”

We hope this will give Trump no clue as to improving U.S. COVID-19 statistics, in case Diamond and Silk fail to convince enough Trump supporters, the numbers are all wrong anyway. Why not simulate them?

The story of Daily Beast too Remarks that China has fiercely lobbied not only against the Trump administration’s use of the “Chinese virus” or “Wuhan virus”, but has even gone so far as to insist, through the best experts on the disease , that there is even no evidence that the virus originated in Wuhan. So far, Trump has said nothing about Xi assuring him that the virus was coming from the Deep State Democrats, but give him time.

Just because we are tenacious for details, we checked the priceless Trump Twitter Archive, where a quick search found that Trump’s last tweeted mention of the “Chinese virus” was on Sunday March 22 which actually preceded Trump’s tweet about his call with Xi four days later. (Maybe he had been pre-flattered?) And wow, what kind words for the Chinese experience with the virus he had then.

And it sounds notable: in the days leading up to the call, Trump’s tweets and especially his retweets repeatedly stressed that China cannot be trusted, that Trump had wisely banned travel to from China, etc. But not a single nasty word about China after the phone call, at least not so far:

Trump’s new respect for the excellent work done by China also seems to have been magically taken up by other members of his administration. Remember how Mike Pompeo blew up a G-7 meeting last week because no other country wanted to say “Wuhan virus”? Apparently, the State Department has changed its tone since Xi spoke to Trump:

According to two senior Trump administration officials, the State Department also softened the harsh speech about Beijing for not revealing its number of coronavirus cases earlier.

In recent cables, it seems that the department no longer calls the virus “Wuhan virus” and rather designates it as “COVID19” or simply “COVID”. As a senior Trump official told The Daily Beast, “It is understood that the department and the administration as a whole will back away from this terminology.”

Oh man, we’re going to have to tear down all the “DEATH TO EAST-ASIA-VIRUS” banners and replace them with the ones that say “WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR WITH ITALY-VIRUS”.

Programming note / reminder: Later this afternoon, we will head to invade the discussion of the Slog’s book club on Albert Camus Plague.

[[[[Daily Beast / WSJ]

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