On Thursday, Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) appeared on Fox News’ “The Story” with Martha MacCallum, who asked him if the United States could ever trust China again after their machinations regarding the coronavirus, prompting Cotton to snap, “I have never trusted a Communist and I never will trust a Communist. That’s who runs China — the Chinese Communist Party.”
MacCallum started the segment by quoting from a FoxNews.com op-ed from Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro, who had written, “The Chinese government is chiefly responsible for the explosion of this pandemic . . . to trust the Chinese government after a global betrayal of this magnitude would not only be foolish, it would be immoral.”
MacCallum asked,“Does this fundamentally change our relationship with China and can we trust the government of China anymore?”
Cotton answered:
I have never trusted a Communist and I never will trust a Communist. And that’s who runs China, is the Chinese Communist Party. China doesn’t deserve to be trusted, as the president said; they unleashed this pandemic on the world. In early December, they knew that there was some kind of outbreak happening with the novel coronavirus in Wuhan.
If they had acted quickly, rather than lying to their own people, suppressing the whistleblowers, and lying to the world, then not only China but U.S. and other scientists and researchers and epidemiologists and other experts from around the world could have helped them contain this in Whuhan or in Hubei Province. Look what we have now: A pandemic and a severe global recession. Again, because of the Chinese Communist Party’s dishonesty, corruption, and incompetence.
MacCallum noted that in the early stages of the coronavirus, President Trump trusted the Chinese. She asked, “Can we ever work with them again?”
Cotton replied, “Simply because we can’t trust a Communist like [Chinese President] Xi Jinping doesn’t mean that we don’t have to talk with him. As Ronald Reagan said when we talked to Soviet leaders, ‘Trust but verify.’”
He continued:
So of course President Trump has to maintain open lines of communication with all of our adversaries around the world; however, we cannot trust China to continue to manufacture our pharmaceuticals, things like antibiotics and penicillin, ibuprofen and acetaminophen, so say nothing of dozens of other basic pharmaceutical ingredients. That’s why I would say that the military, health and human services, meaning Medicare and Medicaid, the VA, can no longer buy drugs that are sourced from China and I would give incentives for companies to bring manufacturing of basic pharmaceuticals back to the United States.
MacCallum asked what differentiated Cotton’s bill from other bills with similar intent.
Cotton answered, “There’s a lot of different approaches; what we do is use the purchasing power of the entire United States government, every agency in the United States government that buys pharmaceuticals at scale. We don’t say, ‘Study the problem,’ we don’t say, ‘Form a commission and get back to us,’ we just tell them within a certain time, stop buying these drugs. And at the same time we provide incentives so we can start making those drugs here.”
Video below:
via The Daily Wire
Enjoy this article? Read the full version at the authors website: https://www.dailywire.com