Trump Attacks Taiwan in Wild Fox News Exchange: ‘They Stole Our Chip Industry!’

President Donald Trump went on a rant against Taiwan, telling Fox News anchor Bret Baier that they “stole our chip industry” as he was pressed about his private remarks to  China’s President Xi Jinping .

The president has just wrapped up a high-stakes trip to Beijing, China, where he was feted by and conferred with President Xi amid a blanket of pageantry and secrecy. The trip drew the attention of the world and concern over Trump’s statements about Taiwan.

Baier scored an extensive sit-down with President Trump in Beijing, which aired on Friday night’s edition of Fox News Channel’s Special Report.

In one exchange, Baier pressed Trump about whether he will approve a pending arms sale to Taiwan. He asked Trump “Should the people of Taiwan feel more or less secure after your meetings with President Xi?”

Trump insisted they should feel “neutral” — but then went on a riff about Taiwan’s history of “stealing our chip industry”:

TRUMP: It’s a — it’s a very good negotiating chip for us, frankly. It’s a lot of weapons. It’s $12 billion. It’s a lot of weapons.

But, you know, when you look at the odds, China is a very, very powerful, big country. That’s a very small island. It’s — you think of it, it’s 59 miles away, 59 miles. We’re 9,500 miles away. That’s a little bit of a difficult problem.

With all of that being said, you know, if you look at the history of Taiwan, Taiwan was developed because we had presidents that didn’t know what the hell they were doing. Because, if they would have put tariffs on chips coming in, it would’ve — they would have never left. Everything was about Intel, and everything was about our chip companies. They stole our chip industry.

So I’ve said that for years. I said, you know, for years they stole our chip — if we would have had one of our presidents just say, we’re going to say — we’re going to put 100 percent chip — you can leave, you can build in Taiwan, but we’re going to — you sell it back into the United States, we’re going to put a 100 percent or a 200 percent tariff, we would have never lost the chip. We lost the chip industry. It’s all coming back.

And I do say this. Taiwan would be very smart to cool it a little bit. China would be very smart to cool it a little bit. They ought to both cool it.

Watch above via Fox News Channel’s Special Report.

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