Trade Adviser blisters CCP: Dismantled 'beautiful economy'

FPI / May 12, 2020

President Donald Trump “built the most powerful and beautiful economy in the world in three years,” and “the Chinese Communist Party took it down in 60 days,” White House trade adviser Peter Navarro charged on Sunday.

Speaking on Mother’s Day in an interview on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures”, Navarro said: “This morning, Americans won’t go to church because of the China virus. Sons and daughters of America won’t be taking their mothers to brunch. Tomorrow, 33 million Americans won’t be going to work and millions of children in America will be home climbing the walls instead of learning reading, writing and arithmetic.”

The Navarro interview came days after House Republicans launched a “China Task Force” to coordinate a strategy against the geopolitical threat from Beijing amid global scrutiny over China’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak.

Some U.S. officials have pointed to the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab as the possible source of the outbreak.

“We know that ‘patient zero’ in China, it was about mid-November, it was in Wuhan,” Navarro said. “We know that ‘ground zero’ had the P4 weapons lab where the virus likely came from.”

Navarro continued: “For the next two months, we know that China hid the virus from the world behind the shield of the World Health Organization, and as they did that, they sent gleaming passenger jets from China, not into the rest of China from Wuhan, but to the places like New York and Milan seeding the world with what would become a pandemic.”

Navarro added: “As they did that, we also know from their own customs data, that they vacuumed up virtually all of the world’s personal protective equipment [PPE], including over two billion masks.” The surge of COVID-19 cases across the U.S. led to an unprecedented shortage in PPE for medical professionals on the front lines.

Navarro said that China was “sitting on” on the stockpile of PPE.

“They’re selling it at profiteering prices to some, and to other countries, they’re actually putting pressure on those countries to deny the virus came from China, or to talk about Taiwan,” Navarro said.

Navarro was later asked “How many years before we feel normal again?”

He responded: “I think this is going to be a multi-year period as we go through, and I think that’s why it’s important to have somebody in the White House who actually understands economics and the economy. This will be an ongoing struggle of complexity, that we’re going to have to have somebody in the White House who focuses on the economy. It’s jobs, jobs, jobs and jobs.”

Free Press International