Trump ignored human rights for trade deal
DONALD Trump has admitted he overlooked the Chinese persecution of a million Muslims so as not to jeopardise a multi-billion dollar trade deal.
The treatment of the Uighur community and other minorities in western China, under which they have been rounded up and held in ‘re-education’ camps, is a major human rights controversy.
But the president put the deal with Beijing above everything else, says a memoir by Mr Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton – which is out today. He even gave Chinese leader Xi Jinping his blessing for such ‘concentration camps’, claims Mr Bolton.
Despite calling the book fiction, Mr Trump corroborated the claim in an interview with news website Axios, admitting he did not want to upset negotiations by retaliating against the Chinese Communist Party Officials over the camps.
The president said: ‘Well, we were in the middle of a major trade deal. And I made a great deal, $250billion potentially worth of purchases. And by the way, they’re buying a lot, you probably have seen. And when you’re in the middle of a negotiation and then all of a sudden you start throwing additional sanctions on — we’ve done a lot. I put tariffs on China, which are far worse than any sanction you can think of.’
In extracts leaked from Mr Bolton’s book last week, he wrote: ‘Mr Xi told Mr Trump that he was “basically building concentration camps in Xinjiang”. According to our interpreter, Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do.’
In an interview to promote The Room Where it Happened, Mr Bolton launched an stinging attack on his former boss, saying that he hoped Mr Trump would be consigned to the annals of history as a one-term president.
‘I hope [history] will remember him as a one-term president who didn’t plunge the country irretrievably into a downward spiral we can’t recoil from,’ he told ABC yesterday. Describing the president as ‘erratic and impulsive’, he said his re-election would be a ‘danger to the republic’.
‘The concern I have, speaking as a conservative Republican, is that once the election is over, if the president wins, the political constraint is gone,’ Mr Bolton said.