White House trade adviser Peter Navarro told “The Story” Monday that President Trump has decided to terminate the China trade deal as intelligence officials grow increasingly confident that the coronavirus pandemic originated in a Wuhan laboratory.
“It’s over,” Navarro told host Martha MacCallum.
“Here’s the turning point,” he explained. “They came here on January 15th to sign that trade deal, and that was a full two months after they knew the virus was out and about.
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“It was a time when they had already sent hundreds of thousands of people to this country to spread that virus, and it was just minutes after wheels up when that plane took off that we began to hear about this pandemic.”
Navarro went on to compare China’s actions to the Japanese government holding peace talks with the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in late 1941, weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor
The trade agreement was meant to ease tensions between the world’s two largest economies following a trade war that stemmed from accusations by Washington that China had for decades been manipulating its currency and stealing U.S. trade secrets.
Last month, Trump said that although the deal was just kicking in, he felt “very differently” about it since the onset of the coronavirus outbreak in America. However, he stopped short of terminating the deal at the time.
“It just seems to mean less to me,” Trump told reporters last month. “It was very exciting, one of the biggest deals ever made, but once the virus came in, I said, ‘How did they let that happen?’”
The administration has been mulling avenues to possibly punish or seek financial compensation from China for what it sees as withholding information about the virus.
“I think that everybody here inside the perimeter and around this country now understands that China lied, and Americans died,” Navarro said Monday
The trade adviser added that the November election will likely boil down to three key issues “jobs, China, and law and order,” and said that Trump’s decision to end his long-touted trade deal proves that he “runs the table on all three of those, especially China.”
