Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy told Iowa voters Saturday that his administration would sign a “declaration of independence” from communist China.
Ramaswamy was attending Republican Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds’ Fair-Side Chat series at the Iowa State Fair with a packed crowd of attendees. Reynolds asked Ramaswamy to explain what he would do with China’s threat to national security if he were elected president in November 2024, and the 2024 hopeful replied that “We cannot depend on an enemy for our modern way of life.” (RELATED: ‘I Would Be An Impossible Candidate … To Beat’: Longshot GOP Candidate Says He’d Win In A Landslide Against Biden)
“We never depended on the USSR for the shoes on our feet or the phones in our pockets, we just didn’t,” Ramaswamy said. “Today we depend on communist China for the way we live our lives, that doesn’t work over the long run … If Thomas Jefferson, my favorite president, if he were alive today, the declaration he would be signing is the Declaration of Independence from Communist China, that’s a declaration of independence that I will sign.”
GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy talking with fairgoers at Jalapeno Pete’s at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines #Iowa #iapolitics #iacaucus #IowaStateFair pic.twitter.com/lC3soMS9jk
— Kevin Cavallin (@gene5335) August 12, 2023
Ramaswamy told Iowa voters that the U.S. needed to grow a “spine” and that the only real question left would be who ends the unhealthy relationship first. He argued that the reason the U.S. is still working with China is because “we are scared” and “we depend on them,” but that he would “speak the hard truth.”
Ramaswamy has repeatedly slammed businesses for working with the Chinese Communist Party. In May, the GOP candidate criticized Elon Musk for meeting with China’s foreign minister to prevent a further breakdown in the U.S.-China relationship, saying that the owner of the social media platform Twitter was “in China’s pocket.”
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