Navy SEAL veteran Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) said the left seems “obsessed” with blaming President Donald Trump for the spread of the coronavirus in the United States, even more so than China — where it originated from and where authorities tried to hide its outbreak, in an interview with Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Daily on Tuesday.
“They beclown themselves in the process because it’s very difficult to argue something when the evidence is stacked against you,” Crenshaw told host and Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow.
“They’ve got a lot of confidence in arguing that because they generally get a lot of cover from mainstream media,” said Crenshaw, who recently defended Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic on Bill Maher’s show. He appeared to stump Maher at times throughout the interview.
“They will repeat a mantra, something like the ‘lost month of February,’ and they’ll never back it up, they’ll never really say why they believe it’s the lost month of February. They’ll never really make an argument but they’ll repeat it over and over again,” he said.
“It gets repeated throughout the media, it gets repeated by every single Democrat, it’s like a collective, they’re very good at this type of messaging, and they’ll just scoff at you if you question it in this sort of a smug kind of way. If you’re willing to break past that, and go behind enemy lines and actually have the debate, it can really go in our favor,” he said.
Crenshaw and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) have introduced legislation that would allow Americans to sue China for damages related to the coronavirus due to its delay in notifying the rest of the world and taking measures to limit its spread. A Southampton University study found that if China acted just one week earlier, it could have reduced cases by 66 percent.
Chinese authorities also ordered scientists to destroy evidence of the virus and stop sharing data about it. Beijing notified the World Health Organization of the virus on December 31, despite having 41 patients by then, but argued as late as January 14 that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission. It was not until January 20 that China and the WHO acknowledged human-to-human transmission was possible.
Crenshaw said he did not expect a lot of support for their legislation from Democrats.
“If there’s any blame towards China, it takes away blame from Trump. These people have become completely and utterly obsessed with this idea that Trump has blood on his hands, and he’s totally responsible for a global pandemic,” he said.
He said Democrats should be challenged on their talking points.
“You have to ask them a simple question — if you’re going to criticize somebody, then criticize at a specific decision point with the facts they had at the time and tell us how it was so obvious that you would have made a different decision, show us the fork in the road?” he said.
“They can’t do that, because they’re not objective, and they’re not critical thinkers, but I hope they’ll be critical thinkers at least as it falls on the China issue and work with us on this,” he said.
He said he was curious as to how Democrats would attack Trump’s pending suspension of all immigration into the country amid the coronavirus spread and need to protect American jobs.
“If you’ve noticed in the last couple of weeks, the leftwing has criticized Trump for not doing enough of a travel ban on Chinese travel restrictions back in January,” he said.
“I’ wonder how they’re going to about-face and completely criticize him over this particular ban,” he said.
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