Editor's Note: Tom Fowdy is a British political and international relations analyst and a graduate of Durham and Oxford universities. He writes on topics pertaining to China, the DPRK, Britain, and the United States. The article reflects the author's opinion and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

On Thursday afternoon U.S. President Donald Trump, caught in the middle of an impeachment inquiry surrounding an alleged request to Ukrainian president to investigate the son of presidential candidate rival Joe Biden, openly invited China to also investigate the family. He alleged that China had given Hunter Biden 1.5 billion U.S. dollars and directly accused the Bidens of being responsible for China's "sweetheart relationship" with the United States, which saw them"ripping off our country."

Not surprisingly, the media reacted with dismay to the announcement and observers upped calls that Trump was committing an open act of treason against his country, whilst clearly attempting to make a mockery out of the impeachment investigation. However, the request for China to "investigate" the Bidens is not too serious. The goal of this new narrative is not to expect Beijing to deliver anything, but instead to repeatedly associate the democratic political front-runner with the connotation of being "soft on”and "corrupted by" China, weaponizing the sinophobic currents Trump has unleashed in his own foreign policy against him.

He believes association with China in a negative sense will provide a bigger backlash than Ukraine. In doing so Trump hopes to frame the parameters of the debate whereby he is "tough" on China but that his likely rival is unreliable and weak, serving at the same time as an obvious distraction from the pressure which is being turned up on him.

To understand why Trump is doing this, first pay attention to the obvious context, and his typical strategies of both distraction and deflection. He is under increasing political pressure at home over potential impeachment, so far the tide is moving against him here. When Trump comes under political attack, his playbook has always been as follows: to weaponize the technique known as "whataboutery" to both distract and deflect from himself.

Whataboutery refers to someone responding to a criticism by aiming to criticize the critic for the same argument with the view of accusing them of hypocrisy and undermining their moral legitimacy to make the claim. In doing so, the adherent therefore creates a "counter-narrative" which thus allows their supporters to psychologically dismiss the original attack.

Trump does this a lot. If he is accused of corruption or treason, he will fire back and accuse the Democrats of the same thing and will go to an extreme length to produce all kinds of "counter stories" and allegations in the view of making their points seem irrelevant, or to change the argument at hand. In this instance, he is seeking to deflect from the accusation he asked Ukraine's leader to investigate Joe Biden by doubling down on his own narrative that Biden is the one committing treason, whilst also accusing the Democrats of a number of other things.

To do so, he is now opportunistically weaponizing the anti-China sentiment his actions unleashed in Washington over the past two years to discredit his opponent. He is aware that association with China in the United States has become politically toxic, with everything being hysterically demonized as being a tool for espionage or infiltration. Trump has sought to thrive upon this narrative by setting out that he is tougher on China in very simple terms.

In turn, before his scandal begun Trump was already working to associate Biden with being "soft on China"repeatedly tweeting that the United States would continue to be "ripped off" if he was the president and end up with an unfavorable deal. Now, he is taking it to a new level. He hopes to weaponize a counter-narrative that Biden and his son are associated with corrupt activities in China, and in turn is openly blaming America's former relationship with Beijing at their doing, saying it is their fault they were "ripping us off."

Thus, he hopes to create a binary narrative that whilst he is "tough" on China, the former vice president is compromised and unreliable. This allows the president to try and deflect from the impeachment allegations accordingly by weaponizing a counter-narrative that Democrats are those who are compromising the country, all whilst holding up his 2020 campaign.

Of course, the real question is: Will it work? One must read through all of this in the context that Trump is increasingly desperate, his twitter feed increasingly resembles an unstable and erratic man seemingly pushed to extremes. In the long run such allegations may help him deflect from criticism among his core supporters, but it should be quite clear that no matter how much noise, distraction and deflection he generates, none of this can save him from real allegations of wrongdoing from Congress if the impeachment inquiry gathers momentum.

In this case, we should expect things to get increasingly volatile, and for Trump to become increasingly unhinged as he squirms under growing pressure.

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