Trump On China's Spying on the US: Meh
Both sides do it, Trump said, so he and Xi didn’t linger on the subject in Beijing
President Trump appeared to shrug off an alarming surge in Chinese espionage and cyber assaults on the U.S., suggesting to reporters aboard Air Force One winging home on Thursday that he and Xi Jinping traded slight complaints about the other’s covert operations but didn’t linger on the subject.
Asked whether he raised China’s aggressive cyber infiltrations of U.S. government agencies and infrastructure during their talks, Trump said, “I did. And he talked about attacks that we did in China. Y’know, what they do, we do too.”
“They’re talking about the spying. Well, we do it too,” he said. “We spy like hell on them too.”
“I told him, ‘We do a lot of stuff to you that you don’t know about and you’re doing things to us that we probably do know about,’” Trump added.
The president’s casual brushoff of record-setting Chinese espionage threats was a sharp departure from one of his major campaign themes in 2016 and again in 2020, when he repeatedly denounced China’s theft of U.S. intellectual property.
