It appears that for the foreseeable future, Donald Trump is going to be spending a lot of time in courtrooms. A couple of New York prosecutors are going over his life and business interests with a microscope hoping to make a name for themselves by charging the former president with a crime. But Trump will also have to fend off at least 29 lawsuitsfiled against him for a variety of alleged misdeeds relating to his businesses and recently, the 2020 election.
None of them are as silly as this one.
The Chinese Americans Civil Rights Coalition is suing the former president for referring to Covid-19 as “China flu.” The reason? The group is saying that Trump caused Chinese Americans to suffer “emotional distress” and were injured by Trump’s “extreme and outrageous conduct” during the pandemic.
Trump demonstrated “reckless disregard” for his conduct during the pandemic, the suit says.
Jason Miller, a senior adviser for Trump, told The Hill in a statement, “This is an insane and idiotic lawsuit that is specious at best, and it will be dismissed if it ever sees a courtroom.”
The coronavirus pandemic has led to a worrying and well-documented increase in violence against Asian Americans that activists have blamed in part on rhetoric like Trump’s.
Trump and his allies repeatedly used the term “Chinese virus” and other derogatory phrases since COVID-19 was initially detected in Wuhan, China.
A study from the University of California, San Francisco published in March found that Trump calling COVID-19 the “Chinese virus” in a tweet in March 2020 led to an increase in the use of anti-Asian hashtags on the platform.
What’s an “anti-Asian hashtag”? I doubt whether their idea of what’s “anti-Asian” is the same as a sane, rational, non-woke human being’s idea of “anti-Asian” is.
And why is it necessarily “derogatory”? It’s only derogatory because the activists say it is.
Where was the coronavirus from? China. What was it? A virus. End of argument.
But as the suit points out, the origins of COVID-19 are still unclear.
The plaintiffs allege that Trump knew this as he made his derogatory claims. The suit further claims that Trump should have realized the full impact of his words.
They are swallowing Chinese propaganda if they believe the virus could have originated anywhere else on planet earth except China. Even those who don’t believe the lab leak theory — including the WHO — believe the coronavirus originated somewhere near Wuhan in the late fall of 2019.
The Chinese communists have desperately tried to pin the origin of the virus somewhere else. They even advanced a theory that the American military manufactured the virus and let it loose in Wuhan. They claimed the virus was found in frozen meat products from Europe.