Editor's note: Hannan Hussain is an assistant researcher at the Islamabad Policy Research Institute (IPRI), and an author. The article reflects the author's opinions, not necessarily the views of CGTN.

"We're doing very serious investigations ... We are not happy with China," said a restless President Trump on April 27. "We believe it could have been stopped at the source. It could have been stopped quickly and it wouldn't have spread all over the world.”

The U.S. government's recourse to widespread, anti-China propaganda is clearly a pathological obsession as opposed to a reflexive one.

At a time when the Trump administration keeps brazenly marketing its ill-coordinated, deeply embarrassing COVID-19 response, it is unsurprising why targeting China is a priority. Doing so provides Washington a convenient cover to deflect its own criminal negligence.

But there is only one problem: none of this scapegoating seems to be working.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo blew the lid off Trump's "investigation pitch" against China, when he said that the virus gaining force in his state had nothing to do with it. "We acted two months after the China outbreak. When you look back, does anyone think the virus was still in China waiting for us to act two months later?" argued Cuomo on April 25.

The governor added that the novel COVID-19 had entered his state via transmission cases from Europe, pointing to thousands of infections before America's war-time president decided to move on it in March. These serve as some key reversals in Trump's repeated streak of lies.

It is also clear that Washington's belief in Beijing's well-documented COVID-19 gains is of little consequence, given how the U.S. president keeps moving the goalposts from tackling the pandemic to falsely debating its source. Trump's added assertion that the United States "could have stopped [the virus] quickly" is merely a political assault on China, given how his own press called the bluff on his COVID-19 intelligence actions.

A scathing Washington Post investigation this week titled "President's intelligence briefing book repeatedly cited virus threat”found that Trump had shunned more than a dozen of his own Presidential Daily Briefings (PDBs) on COVID-19 as early as January – a sign that every intelligence investigation concerning transparency and preventive action must be traced to Washington, not Beijing.

Post reporters Greg Miller and Ellen Nakashimi state that "for weeks, the PDB — as the report is known — traced the virus's spread around the globe … raising the prospect of dire political and economic consequences. Trump insisted publicly on February 26 that the number of cases within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero", they conclude.

Barring some of the report's blatant allegations against China, the broader takeaways on Trump's negligence put the global debate on COVID-19 transparency where it should be: on hardline U.S. deniers.

Moreover, the report observes that a delay in presidential initiative allowed the virus to "move swiftly through communities across the United States" and spread "virtually unchecked in New York City and other population centers." This is the very definition of information distortion, and the breach of citizens' safety on home soil.

Interestingly, for a government that has tried to scar WHO's credibility – in hopes of bending it to Washington's animus against China – there is sure a lot of emphasis on alleged "virus damages." Quoting a self-manufactured multi-billion dollar damage request from Germany, Trump claimed China owes Washington more that 130 billion U.S. dollars in damages "from the COVID-19 virus."

What Trump refuses to understand is that if any amount of damage is ever inflicted upon a nation's masses, the first step is to take responsibility – not attribute it to well-respected foreign powers. An editorial published by Global Times offers a much needed, fact-based rebuttal to this vitriolic assault: "If China had been in the same boat as Western countries in suffering from the pandemic, the West might have felt better. But the U.S. is leading a blame game against China, offering a fantasy where China would provide compensation to lure more countries into the game as if they could benefit from it.”

It is these statements that reflect a degree of mature leadership that governments, in the midst of a pandemic, must demonstrate. But Washington's notion of responsible leadership is understandably different: there is a custom to sell conjecture as proof in press-briefings, and allow a so-called "world-renowned press" to publish such fabrication in broad-daylight.

There is also significant reason to believe that the sentiment of an average American citizen is not as hostile to China, contrary to what Trump would ever care to admit. In the lead-up to 2020 for instance, an overwhelming majority of Americans said they favored friendly cooperation and engagement with China, communicating their discontent to "limiting China's power"– a hallmark of the Trump administration.

Hence, the U.S. president's misled belief that he can smear China's reputation, and elevate his own in the process, is destined to fail. If this belief ever ends up fulfilling even one objective, that would be to reveal to all Americans what arrogant COVID-19 leadership looks like.

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