Former President Donald Trump is set to address concerns over China’s potential threat to America’s farms and food supply during a Monday event in rural Pennsylvania, according to a host of the event who spoke to The Post. Trump has vowed to ban Chinese nationals from buying US farmland or owning telecommunications, energy, technology, and medical supplies companies if he were to retake the White House.
The 45th president will be accompanied by former New York Rep. Lee Zeldin, the 2022 GOP gubernatorial candidate and his former ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, at a family farm in rural Westmoreland County. According to Zeldin, who is affiliated with the Protecting America Initiative which is hosting the event, “China’s Communist Party is threatening our food supply.” He claims that the United States has lax reporting and enforcement of foreign-owned companies that purchase farms.
President Trump understood this threat when he was in the White House,” Zeldin said, adding that “China wants us to be dependent on the supply chain.” This dependency on China became apparent during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, when there was a dramatic shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) across the country as most of the supply was manufactured in China and not in the US. Nurses even resorted to wearing trash bags due to the shortage of PPE.
The cruel irony, according to Zeldin, is that America was dependent on protective masks from China, the origin of the worst pandemic in a century that spread across the globe killing millions in America and globally. The Trump-Republican Party platform includes a plank calling for securing “strategic independence from China.
Republicans will revoke China’s Most Favored Nation status, phase out imports of essential goods, and stop China from buying American Real Estate and Industries,” the Trump-GOP platform states. Zeldin also pointed out that China’s investment or purchase of US assets would trigger more espionage, as Chinese-based firms must abide by compliance requirements that they turn over sensitive information to the communist government.
In a recent development, Linda Sun, a former top aide to Gov. Kathy Hochul who previously worked for ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, was charged with acting as an agent for the Chinese government.
