In the minds of his most loyal acolytes, it shifts blame from himself to China.
Absolutely, China must be held accountable; something went devastatingly wrong and we need to understand what we can do to stop this happening again. People aren't going to magically forget where this all began, since it's had such a profound impact on all our lives.
But the idea behind using that term so frequently I feel is to mask his own incompetencies. A pandemic on this scale has been predicated for a years, in a bid to improve our prepardness. Some countries have responded better than others - the USA hasn't done so great when compared globally, and that rests squarly on is shoulders (despite Trump stating that the US was doing better than "the world" in relation to deaths per million).
But he's the true "Teflon Don", and he knows it. He can say anything, and there'll still be a portion of the US population who will support him nonetheless (i.e. people have been trying to defend his performance during the recent Axios interview, which blows my mind).
