Hours before speaking at a rally at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, former President Donald Trump was a special guest at a roundtable in Smithton in Westmoreland County on Monday where the topic of discussion was China’s influence on U.S. agriculture.
The roundtable at the Smithton barn was organized by the Protecting America Initiative, an organization run by former Trump administration official Richard Grenelle. The group calls itself “a coalition of concerned Americans and public policy experts committed to stopping Chinese influence in the states.”
“Nobody has done what I have done for farmers,” Trump said at the beginning of the hour-long discussion.
While Trump has boasted about his administration’s work on agriculture, he has claimed that the Biden-Harris administration is failing to hold China accountable on agriculture and has promised to call President Xi Jinping to pay tribute the previous contract he signed with him in 2019..
“So the first thing I would do would probably be, my first call, I would call President Xi, I would say you have to honor the deal that you made,” Trump said. “We made a deal that you would buy $50 billion worth of American farm products. And I guarantee you he will buy it. He will 100 percent buy it.”
The second thing Trump said he would do in his phone call with Xi is tell China that they must sentence to death fentanyl traffickers in their country who send fentanyl abroad. Trump said that fentanyl from China Crosses Southern Border of the United States.
September 22 report on CBS 60 Minutes detailed the current fentanyl situation, reporting that “nearly all of the fentanyl coming into the U.S. is produced in Mexico by two powerful drug cartels, and the chemicals are primarily purchased from China.”
Farmers who spoke at the roundtable told Trump about the impact of inflation on their daily lives and expressed concerns about China buying more farmland in the U.S.
Trump also reiterated his stance on the planned sale of Pittsburgh-based U.S. Steel to Japan’s Nippon Steel.
“I wouldn’t let that happen,” he said. “I would help them make the steel company good again.”
During a visit to Pittsburgh on September 2, Vice President Kamala Harris, Democratic presidential candidate said she believes U.S. Steel should remain American-owned company, a position President Joe Biden also holds. “It is critical for our country to maintain a strong American steel company,” Harris said
While China was expected to be the main topic of the conversation, Trump also mentioned imposing high tariffs on companies moving to Mexico, specifically mentioning manufacturing company John Deere.
“They announced a few days ago that they would be moving a significant portion of their manufacturing operations to Mexico,” Trump said. “I’m just informing John Deere. If you do that, we will put a 200% tariff on anything you want to sell in the United States, so if I win, John Deere will pay 200%.”
The company recently announced plans move part of its production From Iowa to Mexico.
As he has done in most of his campaign speeches in Pennsylvania this cycle and in previous elections, Trump promised to protect the fracking industry and cited previous comments Harris said in her previous presidential race that she wanted to end fracking.. However, during her presidential campaign, Harris said she did not want to ban fracking and they repeated this point during the debate at the beginning of this month.
Grenell and former U.S. Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY), both senior advisers to the Protecting American Initiative, hosted the event. Dave McCormick, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, also spoke and said that if elected, he would stand up for farmers by taking on China.
Also participating in the roundtable discussion were U.S. Rep. GT Thompson (R-15th District), who is the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, and state Rep. Dan Moul (R-Adams), the minority leader on the Pennsylvania House of Representatives Agriculture and Rural Affairs Committee, and Interim President of the Pennsylvania Senate Kim Ward (R-Westmoreland).
Harris’ campaign released a statement saying Trump was not an ally to farmers in his first term and a second term would be even worse.
“Despite all his lies and flattery, Donald Trump has used the White House to hand out handouts to wealthy corporations and foreign companies at the expense of family farmers, has driven record farm bankruptcies, and has sacrificed small American farmers as pawns in his failed trade war with China,” Harris campaign spokesman Joseph Costello said in a statement.
Harris added that he “believes in investing in rural America and creating opportunities for working families to thrive, through tax cuts for the middle class, support for small farmers so they can compete, and an aggressive plan to hold Big Agriculture accountable when it defrauds consumers.”
This is a developing story that will be updated
