Trump’s Supporters Are Getting the Lab-Leak Story Backwards
If their thesis is right, it points to a course opposite what they propose.
Suppose it’s true. Suppose the coronavirus spread throughout the world from a Chinese lab. What then?
A ferocious early promoter of the idea that the coronavirus was a Chinese attack was the Trump White House’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon. Bannon hoped to transfer responsibility for Donald Trump’s failures onto China’s rulers. As he told a Polish interviewer in May 2020: “They are totally, 100 percent culpable for every death, for all the agony, for all the economic carnage.”
After months of belittling the virus, then-President Trump himself briefly endorsed the Bannon line. “We went through the worst attack we’ve ever had on our country; this is the worst attack we’ve ever had,” he in May 2020. “This
