President Donald Trump leveled a series of accusations on Thursday that China interfered in the 2020 election to prevent him from winning. Is that going to be enough for him to stop treating China with kid gloves and start treating it like the American enemy it is?
Trump claimed that “in mid-2018, China was working to influence the results of the U.S. midterm elections, and later the results of the 2020 presidential election itself,” and that, “separately, in mid-2019, the Chinese government’s strategy against the United States was focused on undermining domestic confidence in the U.S. president.” Trump also claimed that, according to U.S. intelligence, China tried to turn American businesses against him, paid American journalists to write negative stories about him, and attempted to “manufacture illegal ballots for Joe Biden.”
FIGHTING AMERICA, ARMING CHINA: THE WEST’S SUICIDAL TECH POLICY
How much of this is true or not is up in the air. The relevant issue is that Trump clearly believes it, and yet he has spent his entire second term coddling China and treating the Chinese Communist Party like nothing more than a competitive rival instead of as the American enemy it has proven itself to be.
This is most blatant with Trump’s illegal protection of TikTok. Trump has repeatedly violated federal law to keep TikTok operating in the U.S. past its sell-by date, allowing the Chinese app to continue to steal personal data from millions of Americans. If Trump is so frustrated that China was manipulating businesses to oppose him in 2020, you would think that the Chinese algorithm manipulating millions of Americans to hate Trump and America would also be a problem, but Trump has made protecting TikTok one of the top priorities of his administration.
NEW EFFORT CAN HELP BEAT CHINA IN BIOTECH RACE — IF RFK JR. DOESN’T HOLD IT BACK
Trump signed off on accepting 600,000 Chinese students on student visas into American universities, despite Chinese students being a regular source of Chinese espionage on American soil. Trump has also risked giving China military and national security advantages over the U.S. by allowing American companies to sell artificial intelligence chips to the CCP.
Trump has been soft on China repeatedly throughout his term, taking no different a stance on relations with the country than Biden did throughout his astonishingly weak presidency. If Trump is seriously bothered by China’s alleged interference, then he should stop trying to relitigate an election from six years ago and start treating China like the adversary they have been for years.