JONATHAN KARL: The president’s called President Xi a friend. He said the Chinese are proud people. Can you explain to me what the vice president was saying not long ago when he referred to the Chinese people as peasants? Let me — let me play the sound, so you can hear it.
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J.D. VANCE: We borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture. That is not a recipe for economic prosperity. It’s not a recipe for low prices, and it’s not a recipe for good jobs in the United States of America.
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KARL: Did the vice president go off message there? I mean, he’s calling the Chinese peasants. This is something that we heard the — that the Chinese say was ignorant and disrespectful.
I mean, I haven’t heard Donald Trump talk that way about the Chinese.
LUTNICK: No, I’m just going to step back and really just leave the vice president to let him defend himself. He knows what he meant and we all know what he meant, which is that, you know, the Chinese have basically attacked America and ripped us off by undercutting our businesses by the government of China assists their businesses to undercut our businesses, drive them out of business, and take that manufacturing over to China. It’s happened in pharmaceuticals. It’s happened in so many industries, we feel it, steel and aluminum, so many. So, the idea is if the government of China is behind their businesses — imagine if the government of America, the United States of America was backing your business, I mean, you’d be a killer in the world.
So that’s what the Chinese have been doing. And finally, Donald Trump is standing up to it saying, look, in order to make it fair for American businesses, we have to put a tariff on China to level the playing field, to take their government out of being a competitor. We need to have medicines built in America. We need to have those products here in America because we need them.
We can’t have a war and be asking China to send over penicillin. It just — it’s not reasonable. We can’t rely on other countries for semiconductors. We can’t rely on other countries for steel and aluminum.
These are national security issues, and Donald Trump is going to make sure they’re reshored, we have the capacity to do it.
If you’ve seen, you know, an auto plant these days, these are beautiful plants. You know, these new modern plants are amazing and the jobs they create for our American workers are amazing jobs.