Adam Serwer: Trump is inciting a coronavirus culture war to save himself

The Biden camp’s logic is easy to understand. Trump has made China the primary scapegoat for his failures. His supporters are running ads under the hashtag #BeijingBiden. So Biden and his strategists are meeting fire with fire. They’re answering the charge that the former vice president is soft on China by saying that Trump is.

This form of ideological jujitsu comes naturally to Democrats of Biden’s generation, who in the 1990s tried to turn the tables on Republicans who had been painting them as antibusiness, anti-military, and pro-criminal during the Nixon and Reagan eras. In 1992, Bill Clinton ran for president promising to cut taxes. In 2000, Al Gore proposed to spend more on the military than George W. Bush. And in 1994, after successfully shepherding Clinton’s crime bill through the Senate, Biden crowed, “The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is now for 60 new death penalties … The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 125,000 new state prison cells … I’d like to see the conservative wing of the Democratic Party.”

In the 1990s, beating the GOP at its own game was at times politically shrewd. Clinton’s ghoulish enthusiasm for the death penalty—which in 1992 led him to leave the campaign trail to oversee the execution of the mentally disabled murderer Ricky Ray Rector—probably helped inoculate him from the soft-on-crime attacks that had helped sink Michael Dukakis in 1988. Still, Biden’s decision to try to out-hawk Trump on China has three major problems. First, it promotes bad foreign policy. Second, it could stoke anti-Chinese racism. Third, it doesn’t even make long-term sense politically. Republicans, who promoted economic integration with China in the past, are now committing themselves to a cold war with China. If Democrats think that’s a political environment in which they’ll thrive, they’re making a big mistake.

First, the policy. The implication of Biden’s new ad is that China didn’t give Trump timely information about the COVID-19 outbreak, because Trump wasn’t tough enough on China’s leaders. The commercial mocks Trump’s praise for Xi Jinping and is filled with supposedly damning images of Trump and Xi together. By contrast, it shows Biden vowing, “I would be on the phone with China making it clear: We are going to need to be in your country. You have to be open. You have to be clear. We have to know what’s going on.” In other words, Biden would boss the Chinese around.

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This is a jingoistic fantasy. China is a rival superpower run by an authoritarian and fiercely nationalistic regime. Biden can’t force it to comply. When Beijing has given the United States valuable information about virus outbreaks in the past, it’s because American presidents spent time and money building joint U.S.-Chinese initiatives and took pains to make China’s leaders feel like equals. In 2009, Biden’s then-boss, Barack Obama, stood on a stage with the Chinese leader Hu Jintao in Beijing—in the kind of scene Biden mocks in his ad—and said the two governments should “build upon our mutual interests and engage on the basis of equality and mutual respect.” The two leaders announced that they would “deepen cooperation on global public health issues, including Influenza A (H1N1) prevention, surveillance, reporting and control.” As the Rand Corporation’s Jennifer Huang Bouey has noted, this cooperation hastened the development of an H1N1 vaccine. In suggesting that Biden could bludgeon China into submission—in a phone call, no less—the Biden campaign is peddling a lie about how public-health cooperation with China actually works.