Trump ally Stephen Moore thinks the president will ask China to pay reparations over COVID-19

Economist Stephen Moore said Sunday that it’s likely President Trump will ask China to pay reparations to the United States over the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.

“There is hostility right now between these two countries,” Moore, an ally of Trump, said on John Catsimatidis’s Sunday radio show. 

“I do believe that the Trump Administration will require the Chinese at some point to pay some kind of reparation payments to the United States for not alerting us to the danger of the coronavirus and doing severe damage to our economy.”

Trump has been critical of China and has blamed the country for the spread of the disease. The virus is believed to have originated in China in late 2019, and various reports from the media have indicated that Trump administration officials were aware of the threat the coronavirus posed months before preventative measures were taken. 

Congress has also allocated trillions of dollars in stimulus funding to salvage the economy after almost every state enforced social distancing measures including stay-at-home orders and shuttering businesses to stem the spread of the virus. 

Lawmakers, particularly Republicans, have also expressed concern on the dependence the U.S. has on Chinese medical resources. 

Moore called the tension between China and countries who seek to hold them responsible for the virus “a new cold war with China.” 

“There’s no question about it,” Moore said. “It is very suspicious to me: If their goal is world domination, one way of achieving that is by spreading this disease and disabling a lot of the economies they compete with. And they’re going to have to pay”

Republicans have backed Trump’s calls to hold China accountable, with Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) calling for reparations from China over damage from the coronavirus. 

Missouri’s Republican attorney general, Eric Schmitt, filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking to hold Beijing responsible for the outbreak.

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Geng Shuang, told the New York Times the suit was “frivolous,”  has “no factual and legal basis’’ and “only invites ridicule.”

John Catsimatidis is an investor in The Hill