MTG Says Trump Would’ve Shot Down Spy Balloons Before They Ever Reached U.S. – He Didn’t

After the PRC’s spy balloon was shot down off the Carolina coast on Saturday, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted that it would never have been allowed to reach the United States in the first place if Donald Trump were president. But a Forbes report begs to differ.

Greene said that she had just been speaking with Trump about the situation, and that “he would have never allowed China to fly a spy balloon over our country and our military bases and assets.”

“Pres Trump would have shot it down before it entered the US,” Greene tweeted. “And so would I.”

A similar but no quite so definitive statement was made by former Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo when speaking with Fox News host Sean Hannity this week.

“I can nearly guarantee you that that balloon would not still be flying if we were still there,” he said on Friday.

But an article at Forbes published on Saturday claims otherwise, and was shared in reply to Greene’s tweet.

Writer Matt Novak first cited a vague assertion in a DOD statement this week, which said, “Instances of this kind of balloon activity have been observed previously over the past several years.”

Novak noted several articles reporting spy balloons having made into U.S. airspace, including while Trump was president.

The writer first mentioned a Bloomberg article:

Bloomberg News reported on Friday that Chinese balloons flew over the U.S. while President Trump occupied the White House.

“The balloon spotted this week over Montana was not the first time the U.S. has detected Chinese balloons over their territory—with previous incursions occurring during the Trump Administration,” Bloomberg reported.

But an unnamed source from the Trump administration insisted to Bloomberg in that same article that it wasn’t a big deal.

“One top national security official from the administration of former President Donald Trump said none of the Chinese spy balloons were near sensitive sites or had payloads as large as this one appears to carry,” Bloomberg continued.

And if you can’t trust an unnamed official who worked for Trump, who can you trust, right?

That Bloomberg article had just a bit more to it than that, though, and rather pertinently reported “Unlike past cases, this balloon is now lingering over the US mainland, and continuing to move eastward.”

Not a trivial distinction.

The Forbes article next reference an Associated Press report.

“Craig Singleton, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said Chinese surveillance balloons have been sighted on numerous occasions over the past five years in different parts of the Pacific, including near sensitive U.S. military installations in Hawaii,” the Associated Press reported on Saturday.

President Biden has been in office for two years, leaving three years of Trump’s presidency in that window of five years.

That AP reported also included cited U.S. officials and reported “similar Chinese balloons transited the continental United States briefly at least three times during the Trump administration and once that they know about earlier in the Biden administration.”

“But none of those incidents lasted this length of time,” the AP added. That is, again, a point of distinction.

The Forbes article was published early on Saturday before the balloon was shot down and prior to the tweet from Greene. There was no specifically new or independently obtained information on prior spy balloon incidents in the article, but the report from the Associated Press did specifically assert that such balloons were over the United States “at least three times” during Trump’s time in office — though it stated each happened “briefly.”

What is clear that regardless of length of time or location, no balloons were publicly reported to have been shot down during Trump’s time in office.

Whether any would be in a theoretical Marjorie Taylor Greene administration seems a bit remote of a hypothetical to ponder too deeply.

Sen. Ted Cruz on Saturday suggested that Chinese president Xi Jinping knows that Biden would not have shot it down at all if the nation hadn’t been made aware of the balloon by civilians in Montana sharing images of it.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stated definitively on Saturday that the PRC balloon specifically surveilled “strategic sites” in the United States. The balloon “lingered” over areas of Montana where nuclear weapons are siloed. Reports of that kind, including statements from SecDef, certainly never broke through during Trump’s time in office.