President Donald Trump is planning to make China pay for the economic damage caused by their cover-up of the coronavirus outbreak.
On Monday night at the White House Coronavirus Task Force news conference, President Trump was asked about whether or not he planned to hold China accountable–and what his plan would be.
“There are a lot of ways you can hold them accountable,” Trump said. “We’re doing very serious investigations, as you probably know. We are not happy with China, we are not happy with that whole situation. Because we believe it could have been stopped at the source, it could have been stopped quickly and it wouldn’t have spread all over the world. We think that should have happened. So, we’ll let you know at the appropriate time. But we are doing serious investigations.”
Further in the press conference, a reporter mentioned that Germany had sent China a 130 billion euro invoice for the economic damage to coronavirus–and asked Trump if he would follow a similar tack.
“Well, we can do something much easier than that. We have ways of doing things a lot easier than that,” Trump said. “But Germany’s looking at things and we’re looking at things. And we’re talking about a lot more money than Germany’s talking about.”
The Chinese Communist Party has been accused of covering up the origins of the coronavirus epidemic, which began in the city of Wuhan in November.
Experts say that, had China moved more quickly to combat the growing health crisis, the coronavirus would not have spread worldwide.
Since mid-March, the United States economy has been largely shut down–with Goldman Sachs forecasting a historic 24% crash in the U.S. GDP.
In addition, more than 27 million people have lost their jobs due to coronavirus, necessitating the U.S. government pass trillions of dollars in new spending to bail out closed businesses and unemployed workers.
