AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta
President Donald Trump listens to Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, speaks about coronavirus during an Black History Month reception in the East Room of the White House, Thursday, in Washington.

WASHINGTON — As global markets plunged amid growing fears about the coronavirus outbreak, President Donald Trump and his allies pulled from a familiar playbook Friday and blamed others for the slide. It’s a challenging sell for a president who has lashed his fate to Wall Street like no other.

The president’s team responded to the biggest one-week Wall Street sell-off in more than a decade with a deflection strategy, playing down the threat and eagerly parceling out responsibility to Democrats, the media and the entrenched government bureaucracy.

Trump tweeted that “The Do Nothing Democrats” had wasted time on impeachment and “anything else they could do to make the Republican Party look bad” while defending his own response, which many Democrats have deemed sluggish and scattershot.

“They’re doing everything they can to instill fear in people, and I think it’s ridiculous, and I think they’re very disreputable,” Trump later told reporters at the White House before leaving for a campaign rally in South Carolina. “So some people are giving us credit and some people aren’t. But the only ones that aren’t, they don’t mean it. It’s political. It’s politics.”

Some of his closest allies amplified that message and accused the administration’s perceived enemies of hyping the threat posed by the virus, which has killed more than 2,800 people — most of them in China, where it originated.

“The flu kills people,” said acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual gathering for conservative activists. “This is not Ebola. It’s not SARS. It’s not MERS. It’s not a death sentence. It’s not the same as the Ebola crisis.”

Mulvaney went on to accuse the news media of giving short shrift to administration efforts to combat the virus — namely, barring entry by most foreign nationals who had recently visited China — in favor of focusing on negative stories about Trump.

“Why didn’t you hear about it? What was still going on four or five weeks ago? Impeachment, that’s all the press wanted to talk about,” Mulvaney said. “The reason you’re seeing so much attention to it today is that they think this is going to be the thing that brings down the president. That’s what this is all about.”

The travel restrictions were widely covered in the news media.

Donald Trump Jr. embraced another unfounded conspiracy theory, claiming without evidence that Democrats were rooting for people to die.

“For them to take a pandemic and seemingly hope it comes here and kills millions of people so they can end Donald Trump’s streak of winning is a new level of sickness,” the president’s eldest son said on “Fox and Friends.”

The comment drew an immediate rebuke from Democrats, including Rep. John Garamendi of California, who said Trump Jr. should keep his distance after the “totally outrageous” comment because “there would be a serious altercation.”

The president has been consumed by the virus’ impact on Wall Street, peppering aides with questions about the markets and supply chains, according to three White House officials and Republicans close to the West Wing. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

Even as the White House has ricocheted from scandal to controversy to tempest over the past three years, including the president’s impeachment, the nation’s economy has hummed steadily along, giving Republicans reason to stick with the president and bolstering Trump’s reelection chances.