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Opinion | Donald Trump is making China the bogeyman in an election year – sound familiar?
- In 2016, Trump pinned US socio-economic woes on China and won the election. This year, he is pinning Covid-19 on China to distract Americans from his policy failures. Will ‘Getting tough on China’ get him re-elected?
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Why you can trust SCMP
Critics of US President Donald Trump point out how badly he has managed the Covid-19 crisis – but these critics misunderstand Trump’s approach to politics. For Trump, politics is about managing public perception, optimising approval ratings and, most importantly in 2020, winning the presidential election.
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To win an election, Trump knows only too well, one does not primarily need to govern well, but to, first and foremost, get more votes than the opponent.
Crises come and go, and from an electoral perspective, the point is not to solve them, but to mine them as efficiently as possible to one’s advantage, or, more precisely, to use them to boost one’s political profile. And this, Trump has done rather well.
In drastic fashion, Covid-19 has exposed what is wrong with American society. Official infection numbers are by far the highest in the world, and the virus has inflicted an enormous death toll on the country, exceeding the number of Americans killed in the Vietnam war.
It has revealed the vulnerability of large segments of the population, especially minorities: the US is the most unequal developed nation, with about 40 million people living in poverty (more than half of these in extreme poverty) who have little or no health insurance and often no access to quality health care.
Extended areas, particularly in urban regions, are crime-ridden and lack social cohesion. Public health is in peril: more than 20 million people suffer from addiction, the opioid epidemic costs more lives every day (about 130) than car crashes, and more than 40 per cent of the population is obese.
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