President Donald Trump will prioritize ending “slave or near-slave labor” in China during his second term, senior Trump campaign advisor Steve Cortez told reporters on a Wednesday press call.
The assertion comes as the Trump campaign continues to make the case that former Vice President Joe Biden would be soft on the Chinese Communist Party if elected. The campaign touted Trump’s Phase 1 trade deal with China made earlier this year, saying his second term would focus on finalizing a Phase 2 agreement and curbing the ongoing human rights abuses in China.
“To this day Joe Biden doesn’t view china as an economic threat,” Republican Michigan Rep. Jack Bergman told reporters on the call. “He has consistently bowed down to the Chinese communist regime.”
TOPSHOT – This photo taken on June 4, 2019 shows the Chinese flag behind razor wire at a housing compound in Yangisar, south of Kashgar, in China’s western Xinjiang region. – A recurrence of the Urumqi riots which left nearly 200 people dead a decade ago is hard to imagine in today’s Xinjiang, a Chinese region whose Uighur minority is straitjacketed by surveillance and mass detentions. A pervasive security apparatus has subdued the ethnic unrest that has long plagued the region. (Photo by GREG BAKER / AFP) (Photo by GREG BAKER/AFP via Getty Images)
Cortez argued Biden is a “committed globalist corporatist” who wouldn’t take the necessary actions to protect American intellectual property and jobs from China.
The comments came just hours after Biden announced plans to enact a tax bonus for American companies who return from overseas, including from China. (RELATED: US To Block Cotton And Tomato Imports From China’s Xinjiang Region Amid Forced Labor Concerns)
The plan would impose an increased corporate tax rate for companies based overseas, would reward tax credits on American-made products, as well as eliminate offshore tax loopholes.
Biden is poised to visit Michigan on Wednesday where he will make the case that Trump has failed American workers, an accusation Trump made against him in North Carolina.
“For half a century, Joe Biden shook hands with blue-collar workers and then he turned around and immediately stabbed them in the back,” Trump said at his Tuesday rally. “He closed the factories in Baltimore and sent them to Beijing. They were all sent to Beijing.”