Not one to miss an opportunity for self-promotion, US presidential hopeful Donald Trump has suggested that he could have averted the global stock market rout that began yesterday with Chinese shares plunging 8 percent.
Fellow Republican nominee Scott Walker also weighed in, calling on President Obama to rescind his invitation to host Xi Jinping at the White House in September, reports the New York Times.
In an appearance on The O’Reilly Factor on Fox yesterday, the Donald pitched himself as the only candidate who “knows how to handle China.”
How exactly would a President Trump handle China?
Bill O’Reilly: The president of China is coming, a man named Xi Jinping. Do you know him? I have never heard who he is. But he is the president…
Donald Trump: Very smart.
O’Reilly: He is coming over. He is getting a big dinner free at the White House and addressing the UN. If you were president, would you be throwing him a dinner?
Trump: I would not be throwing him a dinner, we’ve had this conversation. I would get him a McDonald’s hamburger and say, ‘You will get down to work because you can’t continue to devalue [the yuan].’ You know, we will give him a state dinner and what he has done is sucked all of our jobs and he has sucked the money right out of our country.
O’Reilly: Again, he hasn’t done it. US companies do it. They’re doing it.
Trump: No, it’s our system.
O’Reilly: So you would be confrontational with the Chinese? You are saying, ‘I’m not giving you a dinner, here is a Big Mac’? Is that what you are going to do?
Trump: I would give them probably a double-sized Big Mac. Look, it’s not so much the companies. It’s our government that allowed China to do that to us.
First of all, yes, apparently Bill O’Reilly is proud of the fact that he does not know who Xi Jinping is.
More importantly, perhaps Trump’s Big Mac offer is not meant as an insult, but a face-saving gesture that allows Xi to burnish his man-of-the-people credentials (first established when Uncle Xi stopped by a baozi joint in December 2013) and avoid charges of hypocrisy for violating his own austerity guidelines.
After all, he did upgrade Xi to a double Big Mac and later said, “I’d get along with him very well.”
Watch the exchange here.
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