Prof wonders if Trump's handling of coronavirus is 'Putin's work'

One American history professor took to Twitter to ask whether President Donald Trump’s plan to combat coronavirus is “Putin’s Work.”

After Trump addressed the nation Wednesday night, laying out his plan to combat the coronavirus outbreak, Boston College Professor Heather Cox Richardson, asked whether the president was “deliberately crashing the American economy” at the request of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“I cannot make sense of this,” wrote the professor. “Is he deliberately crashing the American economy and dividing us from Europe?”

“If so, is this Putin’s work, yet again? A final gift as Trump loses control of the country?” she asked.

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At Boston College, Richardson instructs students on nineteenth-century American history. 

Her profile on the school’s website lists her work that focuses “on the transformation of political ideology from the Civil War to the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt,” which “examined issues of race, economics, westward expansion, and the construction of the concept of an American middle class.”

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The Amazon.com description of Richardson’s book, To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party, states that early Republicans’ “attempts to use government to guard against the concentration of wealth have repeatedly been undone by the country’s moneyed interests and members of their own party.” 

The book supposedly “traces the shifting ideology of the Grand Old Party,” and makes the argument that “Republicans’ ideological vacillations have had terrible repercussions for minorities, the middle class, and America at large.”

In an email to Campus Reform, Richardson said “the tweet itself to my mind was not a big deal.”

”I wondered why that was the angle he had taken,” Richardson said, referencing Trump’s address to the nation in which he announced a 30 day ban on travel to the U.S. from Europe. “Because he has worked so very hard to SUPPORT the stock market, tanking it like that in his second only public address was just odd-- not in keeping with his usual priorities, it seems to me.” 

”Lots of folks chimed in to say they thought he was just an idiot and had made a mistake. Maybe. I actually think he’s got a pretty good sense of the stock market, myself. But maybe he’s overtired. Whatever. I was simply noting that that one short speech was out of the norm for him and, as I said, I couldn’t make sense of it,” Richardson continued. 

”The connection to Putin,” she added, “was a follow-up to the on-going oil war between Putin and Saudi Arabia... The politics of oil are important these days, of course, and I won’t belabor them here. There is lots of work out there you can find on Putin’s role in that new crisis, the one that started our major stock collapse.” 

”Of course I don’t think the coronavirus is a Russian plot, or that Trump is responsible for the overall destruction of the stock market (or the coronavirus) as people are attributing to that tweet,” the professor explained. 

Follow the author of this article on Twitter:@celinedryan