Trump goes off-message to accuse China at summit of meddling in midterm elections
DONALD TRUMP yesterday accused China of interfering in his country’s midterm elections, claiming that Beijing was working to damage him politically in retaliation for his trade war.
Chairing a highly unusual “summit level” meeting of the United Nations Security Council, the president surprised the gathered heads of state and world leaders when he veered off the stated subject of non-proliferation to make his accusations against China.
At the meeting, between the countries’ most senior UN representatives, he said: “Regrettably, we found that China has been attempting to interfere in our upcoming 2018 election, coming up in November, against my administration. They do not want me, or us, to win because I am the first president ever to challenge China on trade. And we are winning on trade. We are winning at every level. We don’t want them to meddle or interfere.”
Mr Trump later stepped up his offensive on China in a press conference when he said: “They would like to see me lose an election because they have never been challenged [on trade] like this.” He also said he considered President Xi Jinping of China a friend – but added: “Maybe he’s not any more.”
He did not provide details of the alleged interference, which was strongly denied by China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi. “China has all along supported the policy of non-interference in others’ affairs,” said Mr Wang. “We did not and will not interfere in any country’s internal affairs and we refuse to accept any allegation of interference.”
A senior US administration official said yesterday that China had been engaged in a “coordinated effort” to swing public opinion against Mr Trump and his allies through “punishing or rewarding think tanks, journalists and Hollywood film studios”. He said there had been reports of “threatening calls from embassy officials” and attempts to “intimidate scholars and journalists”.
He added that it was all connected to the trade war, saying: “the types of activities include targeting certain states and districts owing to tariffs, but go beyond that.”
Mike Pence, the vice president, is due to provide more detail in a speech next month, he said. The accusations came after Mr Trump signed a preemptive executive order on Sept 12 promising sanctions on foreign countries or people who tried to interfere in the US political process.
At the time Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, said the US had seen signs of election meddling from Russia and China, and potential capabilities for such meddling from Iran and North Korea. “It’s more than Russia here that we’re looking at,” he said, adding that the intelligence community had not yet spotted activity on the scale seen before the 2016 election, but warned that escalation was only a “keyboard click” away.
Mr Trump, in only the third-ever summit level meeting on non-proliferation, sat through the contentious 90-minute session stony faced as many of the 15 security council members used their speeches to attack the United States. Evo Morales, the firebrand Leftist president of Bolivia, and a close ally of Venezuela and Cuba, told Mr Trump the US did not “care less for human rights or justice”.
Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, attacked the US, France and Britain for blocking its efforts on a peace deal in Syria, before criticising Theresa May for her “unsubstantiated” claims over the Salisbury attacks.
Mrs May and Emmanuel Macron, the French president, both issued strident defences of the multilateral system that Mr Trump had rejected in his General Assembly speech 24 hours earlier, stressing their continued support for the Iran nuclear agreement, from which Mr Trump withdrew in May.
Mr Trump laughed off Europe’s efforts to circumvent US sanctions, saying: “I think the Europeans will behave very nicely. Just watch.”