When he hasn’t been demonizing immigrants, screaming about “Democrat run cities,” or gutting regulations created to combat climate change, Donald Trump has focused much of the last four years on supposedly fighting China like no other president has had the guts to. Despite having nothing to show for this alleged hardline with Beijing—the president’s trade war has cost U.S. taxpayers, and he praised President Xi Jinping as the coronavirus spread across the globe—with the 2020 election fast approaching, Trump has spent months insisting that if Joe Biden wins, America will be in bed with the authoritarian nation. “Nobody in 50 years has been WEAKER on China than Sleepy Joe Biden,” he tweeted in May. “China will own us!!!!” he type-screamed earlier this month. “Joe Biden must immediately release all emails, meetings, phone calls, transcripts, and records related to his involvement in his family’s business dealings, influence peddlings around the world—including China,” he shouted at a rally last week in Iowa, seemingly referring to an exceedingly sketchy news story allegedly showing financial ties between China and the Democratic nominee.
Of course, as we know from Biden’s tax returns, which he released in contrast to Trump, the former vice president doesn’t have any income from or business dealings with China. But you know who does? The New York Times has an idea:
In addition to the existence of the Chinese bank account—controlled by a company that just happened to record eight figures’ worth of revenue during Trump’s first year in office—the Times reports that shortly after he won the election, Trump sold a penthouse in one of his buildings for $15.8 million to a Chinese-American businesswoman named Xiao Yan Chen, who “runs an international consulting firm and reportedly has high-level connections to government and political elites in China.”
(In a statement, Alan Garten, a lawyer for the Trump Organization, said Trump International Hotels Management LLC had “opened an account with a Chinese bank having offices in the United States in order to pay the local taxes” related to attempts to do business there, adding that “no deals, transactions, or other business activities ever materialized and, since 2015, the office has remained inactive.”)
In related news, earlier this week the Times separately reported an extremely disturbing story concerning diplomats in China, who in 2018 were seemingly victims of an attack similar to the ones on their colleagues in Havana in 2016 and 2017—both groups experienced sudden headaches, blurred vision, dizziness, and memory loss. But while the administration withdrew embassy staff in Cuba, expelled Cuban diplomats from Washington, said U.S. diplomats had experienced “targeted attacks,” and blamed Cuba for not keeping the diplomats and their families safe, its approach to what happened to people in China was suspiciously different:
So yes, there’s definitely someone running for president who is “WEAK” on China, but it’s not Joe Biden.
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