- President Donald Trump said Tuesday that China would “own” the US if it lost to former Vice President Joe Biden.
- “If I do not win the election, China will have the United States – you will have to learn to speak Chinese!” Said Trump.
- The Biden campaign in response told Insider that Trump “is the weakest president in American history with respect to China.”
- Visit the Business Insider website for more stories.
President Donald Trump said Tuesday that Americans must “learn to speak Chinese” if he loses the 2020 election to former Vice President Joe Biden.
Trump implied that Biden would be soft on China, although in reality the former vice president’s campaign has taken a rather hawkish stance against Beijing.
“All they are waiting for, including China, is that I will be defeated. Because if I am defeated, China will own the United States,” Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt.
“If I do not win the election, China will have the United States – you will have to learn to speak Chinese!” Trump added.
—The Recount (@therecount) 11 August 2020
The Biden campaign slammed Trump over his remarks.
“As a result of Donald Trump’s failures, by any metric, China’s position is stronger and ours has diminished,” Andrew Bates, director of Rapid Reaction for the Biden campaign, told Insider.
“Trump has been the weakest president in US history in relation to China. When the most devastating public health crisis in 100 years spread rapidly, he repelled Chinese Communist Party propaganda to retaliate and justify inaction – ignoring warnings from the intelligence community and Joe Biden not taking their word for it, “Bates added.
Bates said Trump has created a power vacuum in the world that China has filled, stating that this is “exactly why several Chinese officials are openly pulling for Donald Trump to win, and why the American people absolutely do not have this outcome. can pay. “
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider.
In the wake of the 2020 election cycle and amid the coronavirus pandemic, which has seen U.S. public sentiment toward China increasingly negative, Trump and Biden have often competed to appear more harsh on Beijing.
Unlike Biden, however, Trump has been heavily involved in xenophobic rhetoric in the process. The president has routinely referred to COVID-19 as the “China virus”, even though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has opposed such discriminatory language and stigmatizing certain groups in relation to the virus.
COVID-19 was first discovered in Wuhan, China. While Trump praised Chinese President Xi Jinping over his handling of the virus early on, he stepped in to blame China for the pandemic, as large-scale cases began to spread across the US. His attacks on China have been part of a broader effort by Trump to deflect his own failures in dealing with the virus.
Trump has continually curtailed the threat of COVID-19 while treating it as someone else’s problem. Public health experts strongly agree that Trump’s response to the pandemic has been disastrous. The US has the highest reported numbers of coronavirus in the world, with more than five million confirmed cases and nearly 164,000 deaths.
On Monday, Trump urged Americans to “stop politicizing” COVID-19 moments before China once again accused the pandemic. But if the president hopes this strategy will boost his campaign, there is ample evidence to support that idea.
Polling in recent months has generally shown that Americans think Biden would handle American relations with China better than Trump. Meanwhile, Trump is bidding badly for Biden in national polls.
