(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
President Donald Trump left Fox News host Maria Bartiromo momentarily speechless during a candid interview Sunday, in which he made surprising remarks about U.S.-China relations, trade deals, and espionage — even appearing to admit to actions often attributed to foreign adversaries.
The exchange began when Bartiromo questioned Trump about a rare earth minerals deal with China.
“You’ve announced an agreement with the Chinese Communist Party, which China will export the rare earth minerals,” Bartiromo said, referencing a critical trade development.
Trump responded by defending the arrangement, saying, “But it should have never gotten that way because we should have been doing the, they call it magnets, it’s a rare earth, but they call it magnets. And they’re making those magnets for us right now, and it — things are well.”
But Bartiromo challenged Trump on his approach toward Beijing, hinting he wasn’t tough enough: “It seems like you go so far with China, but you don’t sort of use the leverage that you can use.”
Trump fired back by revealing a recent security breach: “Well, we did just arrest three or four Chinese nationals who tried to bring a pathogen into the country that gets people sick and destroys the food supply.”
The statement caught attention, but when Bartiromo tried to follow up on the source of the alleged threat, Trump cast doubt: “You don’t know where that came from, though.”
Bartiromo continued, outlining concerns about Chinese espionage, cyberattacks, and intellectual theft: “One of them signed a paper saying that he would value Mao Zedong’s value system. And then they hacked and they hack into our telecom system. They’ve been stealing intellectual property. They — fentanyl, COVID. I mean, you know, all of this stuff. So, how do you negotiate with obviously a bad actor and trust them on economics?”
Then came Trump’s jaw-dropping reply: “You don’t think we do that to them? So we do a lot of things.”
The moment left Bartiromo stunned. “That’s the way the world works?” she asked.
“That’s the way the world works,” Trump replied. “It’s a nasty world.”
Bartiromo then asked how that could lead to trade negotiations. Trump simply concluded, “We do. Well, we made a lot of money with this trade deal.”
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