'They did it to get me out': Trump suggests COVID-19 was a Chinese plot to cost him the election

Former President Donald Trump on Sunday passively accused China of purposefully spreading COVID-19 into the United States to destroy his political career.

"China, I was very firm, I was probably the first one I said, it came from the lab in Wuhan. I knew that," Trump declared on Life, Liberty & Levin, starring right-wing Fox News host Mark Levin.

Scientists have yet to form a consensus as to how and why SARS-COV-2 began infecting human beings. The British Broadcasting Corporation explained in March that "a World Health Organization (WHO) investigation was supposed to get to the bottom of it, but many experts believed it produced more questions than answers. A team of WHO-appointed scientists flew to Wuhan in early 2021 on a mission to investigate the source of the pandemic. After spending 12 days there, which included a visit to the laboratory, the team concluded the lab-leak theory was 'extremely unlikely.'"

The BBC noted that the "natural origin" theory "was widely accepted at the start of the pandemic, but as time has worn on, scientists have not found a virus in either bats or another animal that matches the genetic makeup of COVID-19, leading some to doubt the theory." Although the BBC pointed out that most experts still believe that the virus mutated on its own, Trump, who is not among them, maintains his own reasons for clinging to the counternarrative.

"For one thing, you saw body bags all over the place around that lab. You know, there were body bags all over that area and nobody talks about it. But in Wuhan you had, through satellite pictures and other things, you had pictures, body bags all over the place. And you could see little lines, you know, from way up. But, They couldn't be anything else. But I said, and I've said right from the beginning, it was the lab in Wuhan, it got out. It got out of the lab," Trump opined. "I think it was incompetence. I, I really believe it was incompetence."

Trump suggested that the pandemic was Beijing retaliating against the tariffs that he imposed on Chinese goods and that China orchestrated the health crisis to ruin his chances in the 2020 election.

"You know, people said I was charging China so much money in tariffs, in taxes that a lot of people said they did it to get me out," Trump proclaimed. Those taxes cost American taxpayers $3 billion per month.

Trump then gloated that "We did great in that election. We did, I did much better in the second election than I did in the first."