President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that China will “do anything they can to have me lose” his re-election bid in November because Beijing believes his presumptive Democrat opponent, Joe Biden, will lift trade and other restrictions Trump has imposed on China.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) responded through one of its state media organs that Trump is trying to whip up anti-China sentiment to win the election.

The CCP’s Global Times tried insulting Trump’s manhood and claimed he is endangering American lives by continuing to question China’s conduct instead of embracing help from Beijing to fight the coronavirus – a mistake the CCP said a shrewd and compassionate leader such as Batman would not make:

China is also the president’s biggest stunt to divert Americans’ rage toward his administration’s own incompetence in fighting the virus. It is believed Trump and his team are aware of how they have failed their jobs in epidemic prevention and control. Only by making Americans hate China can they make sure that the public might overlook the fact that Trump’s team is stained with the blood of Americans. If Trump is man enough, he should prioritize protecting American lives over reelection, and be the political Batman when the US is in crisis. Previously, the president predicted that the US death toll from COVID-19 would be 60,000. Yet, US coronavirus deaths have exceeded the figure, and many more could die. As a president, Trump has the ability to save at least some of them, to prevent the coronavirus deaths in the country from topping 100,000, if he has Batman’s compassion and willingness to sacrifice something of his own to save Americans’ interests. What one fears most is the US president does not have the will, that he would rather see more people die in exchange for his reelection, or that he and his competitors are deceiving Americans, confusing the citizens by a race over who can be tougher on China, making Americans believe it is China which caused the massive infections and deaths in the US. No matter who becomes the next US president, would that person sleep well in the White House, knowing so many people have died?

Batman is arguably the last superhero any Chinese Communist should be invoking in a bizarre pop-culture metaphor, given the role bats are thought to have played in the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic. He is not really the superhero avatar of “compassion,” either, as any number of severely battered criminals and evil clowns languishing in Gotham City’s jails could attest. It is a good thing no comic book writer has yet to create a superhero who obtained his powers from the bite of a radioactive pangolin.