During a portion of an interview that aired on Tuesday’s broadcast of Fox News Channel’s “The Ingraham Angle,” President Donald Trump discussed the United States’ relationship with China and how the communist nation downplayed its fatality count.
According to Trump, China “lost more than any other country.” He said, however, they did not report it.
Partial transcript as follows:
TRUMP: China, the tariffs are going to come off. We’re taking in billions of dollars on tariffs. That would destroy us because it gives them such an unfair competitive advantage. We’re taking in billions. They don’t want me. I get along very well with President Xi, although I must tell you, since the COVID situation I have not exactly been talking to him too much.
INGRAHAM: Can you make them pay for them?
TRUMP: They are paying a lot now.
INGRAHAM: But how could they pay specifically for COVID?
TRUMP: What they’ve done to us in terms of the death of people — and I’m not talking about just us. I’m talking about the world. You can never pay for that. What they’ve done to this country, what they’ve done to the world, you can never, just in terms of death. Economically at some point maybe you can catch up, but you’re talking about a lot of good trade deals. I made an unbelievable trade deal. And frankly, they ordered more corn last week than any time at any time in the history of this country.
INGRAHAM: Are they taking advantage of this pandemic with what they have done to Hong Kong, what they are trying to do in the Philippines, maybe choking off some of the South China Sea? Are they taking advantage of it?
TRUMP: I think that they are hurt much worse than people think. They are having a very hard time in China. China is going very bad inside, the real numbers.
INGRAHAM: Their manufacturing, they say, has gotten back to par.
TRUMP: It’s not. And they are doing poorly. China is doing very poorly. And they lost tens of thousands of people. They lost more than any other country. They just don’t report it. We report everything.
INGRAHAM: How do you know that?
TRUMP: And by the way, I saw a statistic the other day talking about only six percent of the people actually died from COVID, which is a very interesting — that they died from other reasons.
INGRAHAM: They had comorbidities, which you have gotten criticized for because there are comorbidities as the Italians showed for every COVID death, I think it was 70 something percent had two or three comorbidities. But the COVID might ultimately have been the key morbidity to hit them, but the bottom line.
TRUMP: It could be, but it’s an interesting statistic.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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