President Donald Trump is the first modern president bold enough to call China our enemy, Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) told Breitbart News Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle Thursday during a big event in Washington, DC, on the China threat.
Right off the bat, Banks praised Trump for being the first president of our lifetime to take the threat of China “seriously.”
“First of all, President Trump is the first president of our lifetime that’s taken the China threat seriously. I remember on the campaign trail in 2016 – just to go back in history a little bit – the primary between Cruz and Trump came down to Indiana,” he explained, noting that Indiana is the top manufacturing state in the country.
“My dad is a retired union factory worker, and when Donald Trump came to Indiana on the campaign trail to Hoosiers, he talked about, China is our biggest enemy, it’s the biggest threat to our jobs, to the American-made economy…” he said, noting his father “never heard a politician talk like that before, except for Ross [Perot].”
“My dad had the Ross Perot sticker on the pickup truck when I was a little kid, and he didn’t get excited about another candidate until Trump,” he said.
Trump, Banks continued, carried that philosophy through his first term, explaining it was the first time the nation had a president who did not call China our friend but “called them our enemy and a threat.”
“He rewrote the national security strategy to reorient our military priorities around China and made up a lot of ground, and made up for a lot of mistakes that previous presidents – Republican and Democrat – had made to strengthen China’s hand over the United States,” the senator said.
“So Trump — Trump was the first president of either party who took this seriously … a lot was done on the military and in the first term, before all the … goofy stuff happened on Russian collusion and impeachments and all that stuff,” Banks said, explaining that Trump’s second term is focused on the economic picture.
“The second term is all about the economic, the tariff picture and reorienting global trade around the world to put American interests ahead of China,” he said. “And [that] quickly got China’s attention.”
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