President Donald Trump Thursday insisted the coronavirus pandemic will be going away but admitted that he's changed his beliefs on China after the virus swept the world.
"We're still in the pandemic, which will be going away, as I say," Trump told Fox Business' Maria Bartiromo. "They scream, 'How can you say that?' I say it because it's going to be going away."
But still, the virus has resulted in a shift for Trump on China, after he initially had said he'd had a good relationship with its President Xi Jinping.
"My mindset has changed on China since they allowed the plague to come in and have such a devastating effect on the world, us, and the world, which is terrible," said Trump. "I view China differently than I did before the plague."
The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that several major corporations are speaking out about Trump's ban on businesses conducting transactions on WeChat, but Trump said bans on the app and on TikTok are a matter of security.
But meanwhile, the United States has lost billions over the years to China through a "rip-off the likes of which the world has never seen," said Trump. "They targeted our farmers and I gave our farmers all of the money that they got targeted for, which was $28 billion over a three-year period. So I gave the money to the farmers."
But when asked if he wants Xi to step down, Trump responded that "they're running their country and we're running our country, and we have other countries that treat us very badly. They treat us like children because we had foolish leadership. I'm being nice when I use the word foolish, we had very foolish leadership at the top, at the presidential level."
Meanwhile, Hong Kong is a "very complex problem," said the president.
"We've given tremendous amounts of money in the form of incentives to make Hong Kong free, to make Hong Kong work, to our detriment," said Trump. "I have taken all that back ... it's owned by China. So why should I give this to China?"
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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