#Trump suggests China allowed coronavirus spread for economic reasons

President Trump says China may have intentionally allowed the coronavirus to spread overseas to sabotage other economies.

“There’s a chance it was intentional,” Trump said in a Wednesday interview with the Wall Street Journal, sharpening his criticism of China over the virus.

“They’re saying, man, we’re in a mess. The United States is killing us,”  Trump added. “Don’t forget, my economy during the last year and a half was blowing them away. And the reason is the tariffs.”

Trump conceded he had no intelligence indicating such a motive, and said “I don’t think they would do that… But you never know. But it has had an impact.”

In recent remarks, Trump questioned how China managed to contain COVID-19 to a region around the city of Wuhan, while allowing it to spread overseas. Chinese data is widely considered unreliable, but indicate the respiratory bug didn’t spread widely inside China.

Trump’s suggestion that China may have intentionally allowed the virus diverges from his remarks in an interview with the New York Post last month, in which he said the viral spread was accidental.

“Bad things happened, let’s face it, bad things happened. They didn’t do it on purpose. But it got out,” Trump told The Post —later clarifying he was referring to the virus getting out of Wuhan, not the theory that the virus may have escaped a Wuhan lab.

Since March, the virus has sickened more than 2.1 million US residents, killed more than 117,000 and left roughly a quarter of all workers temporarily unemployed.