President Trump has signed legislation imposing sanctions on senior Chinese officials as punishment for imposing restrictive national security laws on Hong Kong.
He used a Rose Garden news conference on Tuesday evening to attack presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden, and also said he had signed an executive order ending the former British colony’s special trade status under which it received preferential treatment from the United States.
“Hong Kong will now be treated the same as mainland China, no special privileges, no special economic treatment, and no export of sensitive technologies,” he said.
In recent weeks, senior campaign advisers and allies have urged him to make more of his powers as president to sign executive orders and position himself as a man of action, the better to contrast with his election rival.
“Joe Biden supported China’s entry into the World Trade Organization,” he said. “One of the greatest geopolitical and economic disasters in world history.”
The legislation and executive order will increase the Trump administration’s pressure on China, which the president has also accused of covering up the spread of COVID-19. The initiatives come after Beijing introduced a national security law that critics said would undermine Hong Kong’s autonomy, which was supposed to be guaranteed under the terms of its return to China in 1997.
However, after quickly announcing the moves, Trump pivoted to campaign mode, delivering a freewheeling attack on Biden’s economic policy, family ties, and record in Washington.
“So Joe Biden and President Obama freely allowed China to pillage our factories, plunder our communities, and steal our most precious secrets,” he said.
At one point, he returned to a favorite theme, riffing on how Biden’s son landed a lucrative post working for a Ukrainian energy company and asking: “Where is Hunter, by the way?”
Opponents, such as the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, wrote off the performance as “rambling.” And Fox News’s Brett Baier wondered whether the president had selected the right location for such a partisan speech, pointing out that “had President Obama made this speech from the Rose Garden, Republicans on Capitol Hill would have likely have been up in arms.”
The event was not initially listed on the president’s public schedule. It was added after Biden released a $2-trillion plan designed to combat climate change and stimulate the economy.
