Ordinarily, a claim like the one President Donald Trump leveled at China in prime time this week might herald a major rupture in ties with Beijing.
“The People’s Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history,” Trump declared Thursday from the East Room, sounding personally stung that, according to a minority view of intelligence, the country had tried to undermine his election chances in 2020.
“The Chinese government wanted (the) US president to lose the next election,” he claimed. “The reason they wanted me to lose is because they knew I was wise to them, charged them billions and billions of dollars worth of tariffs, and built the strongest military anywhere in the world.”
The assertions were serious — if neither new nor entirely backed with evidence — and drew immediate indignation from Chinese officials. Yet they were not accompanied in Trump’s speech by any suggestion he planned to punish the Chinese government for its alleged actions.
By the next day, a White House official said planning for Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s lavish state visit to Washington in two months was continuing apace. And they offered no answer when asked whether Trump planned any repercussions for China in response to what he claimed was a data breach of historic scale.
