That kind of nonsense is to be expected from Trump. But Biden will need his own comprehensive argument in response.

The Biden campaign just rolled out a new video that begins to make that argument. There’s some good stuff in it, but there’s more to say, and one hopes Biden will go in that direction:

It’s important that the video directly indicts Trump’s failure to heed the warnings of his intelligence agencies about the novel coronavirus, while claiming the president “put his trust in China’s leaders instead.”

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That is what happened, after all: National Security Council officials warned in early January that the coronavirus could spread devastatingly to the United States. And no matter how many times Trump extols the brilliance of his Jan. 31 travel restrictions, a great deal of time was squandered in the many weeks that followed, during which Trump utterly refused to take the threat seriously, leading to disastrous delays in standing up an adequate federal response.

All throughout that period, Trump did repeatedly insist China’s leaders were doing a great job containing the outbreak, as the video says.

But it’s important to be clearer on why Trump did this, because it’s crucial to holding Trump accountable for this catastrophe.

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In the video, Biden correctly points out that early on, Trump praised China’s “transparency” and thanked President Xi Jinping “on behalf of the American people.”

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“He was more worried about protecting his trade deal with China than he was about the virus that had already come to America,” Biden says in the video.

That’s true: Trump was concerned about his trade deal. But that makes it sound as though Trump cared mainly about being diplomatic towards China for understandable reasons. It misses the much more nefarious aspect of what happened here.

The president’s early praise of China had another aim entirely: It was all about maintaining the fiction that Trump himself had the coronavirus under control in the United States, and that we didn’t need to be concerned about it.

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Again and again, Trump didn’t merely say China had it under control. He said this meant he did, too:

When Trump hailed China’s “efforts and transparency,” he also said : “It will all work out well.”

When Trump said China was “working very hard” to curb coronavirus, he added that “we are in great shape,” because “we’re working very closely with China.”

When Trump insisted China was “getting it more and more under control,” it led him to conclude that coronavirus was a “problem that’s going to go away.”

And Trump claimed that things were under control here, in part because in China, coronavirus was not “getting larger, it’s actually gotten smaller.”

In other words, the claim that China had the coronavirus under control was also central to sustaining the lie that we didn’t need to worry about it here, because he, working with China, had everything in hand.

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That turned out to be wrong — disastrously so, since his cavalier refusal to take the threat seriously helped spawn the failures that are having such devastating consequences right now. In short, the praise of China wasn’t just incompetence. It was hideous dishonesty and depravity.

It will be important to state this part of the record clearly as Trump’s efforts to escape accountability merge with his attacks against Biden as being soft on China. As it happens, early on, Biden repeatedly expressed skepticism toward China’s assurances regarding the coronavirus, in direct contrast to Trump.

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Meanwhile, it is also crucial that this new line from Biden indicts Trump for gutting our preparedness for pandemics — and contrasts that with the previous administration’s record.

During a conference call with reporters, Tony Blinken, a senior adviser to Biden, signaled that this will be a central argument. Blinken recounted the Obama administration’s efforts to prepare for pandemics in similar terms to those in the new video.

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“Trump undid or undercut virtually all the programs and people that the Obama-Biden administration had put in place to prevent, detect or deal with a pandemic originating in China,” Blinken said.

Clearly, that contrast will feed into a big argument that will have to be engaged over who would better prepare us for future pandemics. And here, too, there will be more to say.

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A crucial aspect of this will be making the case against Trump’s efforts to gut U.S. funding for the World Health Organization, which he’s undertaken in service of transparent blame-shifting and ludicrous performative nationalism, which (whatever WHO’s failures) is just insanity amid a global pandemic.

All this also provides an opening for Biden to vow to reassert an international leadership role for the United States on global health and to restate the case for reality-based multilateralism in the face of global problems — such as pandemics.

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There will be time to make all these arguments. But they will have to be made.