Former President Donald Trump said Monday afternoon that his “first call” if re-elected to the Oval Office will be made to Chinese President Xi Jinping to enforce a trade deal from the end of his tenure as 45th president.
“My first call, I’m going to call up President Xi. I’m going to say, ‘You have to honor the deal you made. We made a deal. You’d buy $50 billion worth of American farm product.’ And I guarantee you he will buy it. 100% he will buy it,” Trump said Monday during a campaign event in Smithton, Pennsylvania.
Trump struck a trade deal with China in 2020 that included Beijing’s commitment to halt intellectual property theft, refrain from currency manipulation, cooperate in financial services and purchase an additional $200 billion of U.S. products over two years, including up to $50 billion of U.S. agriculture.
In return, the U.S. vowed to reduce tariffs on some products made in China, but keep duties the White House has imposed on $375 billion worth of merchandise.
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The deal was dubbed the “phase one” trade agreement and came amid the U.S. and China’s 18-month trade war.
“Biden and Harris, they’re never going to enforce anything… That group is a disaster. It’s a disaster for our country in so many ways, but certainly the farmers are one of those ways,” Trump said of the current administration and the deal.
The 45th president joined a panel of farmers on Monday afternoon as part of a Protecting America Initiative event, which is a group led by Trump’s acting director of national intelligence Richard Grenell and former New York Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin that works to prevent China from infiltrating U.S. “farmland, food supply, education system, energy production, manufacturing chains, and our national security.”
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Trump added that in addition to calling on China to honor its 2020 trade deal, he would tell Xi to enforce a death penalty on fentanyl dealers sending the fatal drug to the U.S. via the Mexico border.
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“Second thing I’m going to do is, I’m going to say you have to give the death penalty to your fentanyl dealers who are sending fentanyl. You know, in China, they give the death penalty. They don’t have a drug problem because they give the death penalty,” Trump said.
“But I’m going to say, second thing — and this affects you also, it affects everybody,” Trump told the panel of farmers. “… We’re losing hundreds of 1,000s of people a year. Comes through the southern border. Now, the weakest border in history. It was the best border we ever had when I was there. We built hundreds of miles of wall and everything else, and it was the best border. Now it’s a weakest. I had a handshake deal with him, it was going to happen very quickly, and then this side didn’t, didn’t do anything about it, he said. And he suggested to me, ‘Anybody sends fentanyl to the United States, it’s the death penalty. They get the maximum penalty.'”
“He would have done it. Then we had an election that didn’t exactly work out too good,” Trump added.
Trump was joined by Grenell, Zeldin, Republican Senate candidate to represent Pennsylvania Dave McCormick and other political supporters for the Pennsylvania event.
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