Republicans Quiet During Trump’s Praise Of China Demand Answers On Virus Now

WASHINGTON — Republicans suddenly demanding that President Joe Biden press China about the origins of the pandemic-causing coronavirus had little interest in such accountability a year ago when a president of their own party was heaping praise on the Communist regime.

As more experts express an openness to the possibility that the outbreak began a year and a half ago with an accidental release from a virology lab in Wuhan, top Republicans are taking the opportunity to hammer Biden as well as officials at the National Institutes of Health, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, for providing part of the funding for that lab.

“Joe Biden has been rolling over for aggressors around the world,” Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, who a year ago speculated that the virus may have been a bioweapon, told Fox News on Sunday.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who pushed the “lab leak” theory a year ago, responded on Tuesday to a Washington Post article explaining why it is gaining more prominence with a one-word tweet: “Clowns,” followed by four clown-face emoji.

Neither senator, though, had much to say a year ago when Donald Trump was occupying the White House and taking an entirely different tack with China and its ruler, Xi Jinping.

“China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus,” Trump wrote in a Jan. 24, 2020, Twitter post. “The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”

It was not the first nor the last such compliment. Just two days earlier, the first time Trump spoke publicly about the coronavirus, he told Fox News there was nothing to worry about. “It’s all taken care of. And China is working very hard on the problem. We spoke about it, and China is working very hard on it.”

Two months later, Trump was still lauding China and Xi. “Look, I have a very good relationship with President Xi and they went through a lot. You know some people say other things. They went through a lot. They lost thousands of people. They’ve been through hell,” he told reporters on March 24, 2020, as U.S. cities and states began lockdowns to control the spread of the disease.

Neither Cruz nor Cotton’s office responded to HuffPost’s queries on Tuesday.

“Trump himself wanted to go easy on China,” said Olivia Troye, a White House aide at the time who was working on the coronavirus task force. “They were all about going easy on China.”

Trump repeatedly criticized Democrats in Congress, mayors, governors, the news media and his predecessor Barack Obama for the pandemic, even as he continued to praise Xi for his actions to contain the disease. But Xi did not contain the disease, and his cover-up efforts hastened its spread around the world.

Last April 7, Trump accused the World Health Organization of failing to warn the world about the threat, but then explicitly stated why he had praised Xi for being “transparent” when the Chinese leader had not been.

“Well, I did a trade deal with China, where China is supposed to be spending $250 billion in our country,” Trump told reporters in an explanation he repeated frequently, even though his deal was more of a partial unwinding of the trade war he had started and not a free-trade agreement.

Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton later revealed in a book that Trump had begged Xi in 2019 to help him win reelection by agreeing to buy lots of farm products from the United States.

By mid-April 2020, with death tolls mounting despite his earlier attempts to dismiss the virus as “a hoax” or no worse than the flu, Trump finally abandoned his praise for Xi and started attacking him and China generally. He began calling the disease “the China virus” and even the “kung flu” — language that coincided with increased attacks on Asian Americans.

In fact, Trump could have known far earlier about the danger the virus posed. U.S. government agencies were tracking the spread of a pneumonia-like illness in Wuhan by late December 2019, according to one former White House official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

This material began showing up in Trump’s intelligence briefings in early January 2020, the official said. But Trump did not have an intelligence briefing scheduled until Jan. 6, and only nine scheduled all month. “The entire month of January was lost,” the official told HuffPost.

Since taking over on Jan. 20 this year, the Biden administration has said the WHO should fully investigate the “lab leak” theory and has called on China to cooperate.

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This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.