@goldberg,
Trump seems to be playing the blame game to muddle the waters; his tirades against China can be seen as a ploy to let conservatives and swing voters unleash their anger by directing ire at China instead of Trump's obduracy and stupidity.
This blame game has picked up steam with Trump's abominable decision to target not just Chinese people but Chinese Americans as well. Weijia Jiang, a White House correspondent for CBS News, was buffaloed by Trump after Weijia Jiang asked him the question "why he sees coronavirus testing as a global competition" at a press conference. Exasperated, Trump told her that she should ask China this question, not him.
I think it was another deliberate move aimed to accentuate concerns about China's response to this virus, not how he handles the crisis. Which is to say Trump simply uses every opportunity to inflame public feelings and impute to China the crime of creating this international crisis.
That's why it could be argued that he just scores more points politically when Chinese journalists and American liberals savage or even skewer him publicly, what with he knows he can use it to cement the solidarity of his own base and hoodwink swing voters into believing that some foreign nations hating Trump are in cahoots. And the fact that supporters or most swing voters don't mind the role that Russia played in the former presidential election is just icing on the cake for Trump.
In a sense, you could simply chalk it up to poor Americans' agita over the future of their own nation, which is riven by mounting social disparities and tribal rivalries. The reality that America still has lots of illegal foreign immigrants flowing into America, if anything, only aggravates their nervousness about the safety of their jobs since such immigrants even finagle to get jobs , albeit with minuscule salaries. That also accounts for their enmity towards outsourcing and globalization. I think Trump understands this. That's why he has been talking about reshoring and the need to decouple from China.
For this reason, Chinese people had better not to get dismayed by the fact that Joe Biden is going to take some cues from Trump and also talk up the virtues of reshoring in order to mollify American workers.
Taken together, it would be foolhardy to sell Trump short and simply repudiate his tactics as being partisan and nugatory. He knows a thing or two about how to play this dirty game called politics as a broflake striving to get relected
Joe Biden needs more resourceful consultants helping him. Go for gold , President Biden.