quote:

President Trump's notes from Thursday's coronavirus briefing show someone crossed out the word “Corona” in coronavirus and replaced it with the word “Chinese.”

This picture captured by Washington Post Photographer Jabin Botsford, comes as Trump has stepped up his efforts to scapegoat China for the spread of the coronavirus.

The change in tone from the White House comes as the number of cases in the US rises on a daily basis, and despite Trump initially praising China's President Xi Jinping for his handling of the crisis.

quote:

Toward the end of the exchange, Alexander cited the latest pandemic statistics showing thousands of Americans are now infected and millions are scared.

Alexander asked, "What do you say to Americans who are scared?"

Trump, shaking his head, ripped into Alexander in response.

"I say that you are a terrible reporter," Trump replied. "That's what I say."

The President proceeded to launch into an extended rant against Alexander, saying he asked a "nasty question" and assailing NBC and its parent company, Comcast.

"You're doing sensationalism," Trump charged. "And the same with NBC and Comcast. I don't call it Comcast. I call it 'Con-Cast.'"

"Let me just tell you something," Trump added. "That's really bad reporting. And you ought to get back to reporting instead of sensationalism."

Moments later, Kaitlan Collins, a White House correspondent for CNN, asked Trump if it was appropriate to embark on tirades against members of the news media during a public health crisis.
"You see yourself as a wartime President right now, leading the country through a pandemic that we are experiencing," Collins noted. "Do you think going off on Peter, going off on a network is appropriate when the country is going through something like this?"

Trump defended his verbal assault on Alexander, saying he's "not a good journalist" and launching into another rant against him.

"Coming together is much harder when we have dishonest journalists," Trump said.

Alexander said in a statement that he was "trying to provide the president an opportunity to reassure the millions of Americans, members of my own family and my neighbors and my community and plenty of people sitting at home, this was his opportunity to do that, to provide a positive or uplifting message. Instead, you saw the president's answer to that question right now."

"The bottom line is, this is a president whose experiences in life are very different than most Americans across this country right now," Alexander said. "Not a person who likely worries about finances or had, not a person who in the course of his life is worried about his future, not a person who is worried about where to find a paycheck for his bills or for his rent and as evidenced by the president suggesting that an opportunity to provide for American some reassurance about how they should feel right now, the president instead took it out on me."

Alexander's NBC News colleague and host of "Meet the Press" weighed on the matter, praising him for his "professionalism."

"I wish people on the on the other side of the podium had the same professionalism as well, so thank you, Peter," Todd said.

After striking a somber tone earlier in the week, Trump in recent days has returned to his usual attacks against the press.

At Thursday's coronavirus press briefing, Trump smeared The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.

"They're very dishonest," Trump claimed.
Trump then praised a far-right media outlet, saying it is "very good" and noting, "They treat me very nicely."

The right-wing personality from that media outlet falsely said major newsrooms had "teamed up" with the Chinese Communist Party to attack Trump.

The person then asked, "Is it alarming that major media players that just oppose you are consistently siding with foreign state propaganda, Islamic radicals and Latin gangs and cartels?"

Instead of rebuking the right-wing personality for the question, Trump on Thursday boasted that he had canceled the White House's subscriptions to the country's major newspapers.

"It amazes me when I read the things that I read," Trump said Thursday. "It amazes me when I read The Wall Street Journal which is so negative and The New York Times, I barely read it. We don't distribute it in the White House, and the same with The Washington Post.

quote:

It’s not helpful. It’s dangerous.

Sen. John Cornyn asserted Wednesday that “China is to blame” for the coronavirus outbreak because of its “culture where people eat bats and snakes and dogs and things like that.” Just like that, Texas’ senior senator blamed a nation of 1.4 billion people for a pathogen that likely originated in one meat market.

As if the United States and other countries haven’t had their own episodes of salmonella, E. coli or other outbreaks from mishandled food. As if Texans don’t eat snakes, frogs, alligators and other meats that might strike others as unsavory.

And then, for good measure, Cornyn blamed China for SARS, MERS and the swine flu, even though the first cases of H1N1 swine flu were found in North America in 2009, and the first cases of MERS originated in Jordan in 2012. Perhaps the name of that last one should have been a clue: MERS stands for Middle East Respiratory Syndrome.

Global health experts have since cautioned against tying a disease to a certain location or group of people. Doing so stigmatizes victims and fuels xenophobia. It sends the false message that certain people are carriers of a disease, or people from other communities are somehow less vulnerable to it — in both cases hindering the community health response.
“We need to fight in unison,” World Health Organization director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said this month of the coronavirus threat. “And stigma, to be honest, is more dangerous than the virus itself.”

We are living in uncertain times. Our lives have been upended by a fast-moving, highly contagious disease. We have only begun to see the economic turmoil this pandemic will bring: Rising unemployment. Lost wages. Faltering businesses. It’s tempting to want to blame someone. But consider who pays for such language.

“Calling it the Chinese virus targets the Chinese-American community and then the broader Asian-American community, because no one can tell us apart, quite frankly,” Marina Ong Bhargava, the CEO of the Greater Austin Asian Chamber of Commerce, told us. “People get laid off and there’s fear. If we use this term, then our community is going to be targeted.”


That can take all kinds of forms. Customers not going to businesses owned by Asian Americans. Kids getting bullied. People getting harassed by strangers. Or worse: Last weekend an Asian American family was stabbed while shopping at a Sam’s Club in Midland, a young boy’s face sliced from ear to eye.

This would be a good time for our leaders to appeal to our better angels, just as they did after the 9/11 attacks, when then-President George W. Bush emphasized our fight was against terrorists, not Muslims or people of Arab descent. In this case, our fight isn’t against any group of people, but a pathogen.


Instead, in recent days, President Donald Trump has eschewed the internationally recognized terms of coronavirus and COVID-19 for his preferred term: “the Chinese virus.” Trump is nothing if not a master of branding, his words carefully chosen and relentlessly repeated to drive home a message. The president is trying to paper over his administration’s failures — disbanding a key team of global health experts in 2018 and failing to ramp up production of coronavirus test kits, among other things — by blaming the disease on a foreign country. It aligns with Trump’s toxic worldview blaming immigrants and foreign countries for an array of America’s problems.

That doesn’t make it any less disappointing to see Cornyn parroting this reckless rhetoric.
When the pandemic passes, there will be time to discuss better sanitation standards for meat markets around the globe. There will be time to discuss the Chinese government’s initial mishandling of the coronavirus response, as well as the concerns Cornyn raised about the U.S. heavily relying on any one country for goods.

But in the weeks ahead, with our community life grinding to a halt and hospitals bracing for the worst, Americans need leaders to focus on our medical and economic recovery. We must band together in common purpose, not splinter apart in search of a scapegoat.