Trump Says ‘It’s Up To’ Xi Jinping What China Does In Taiwan

“So supposing you’re Xi Jinping and you’ve watched the events of the past few days — you probably are deeply impressed with how the special operators ran?” “He was impressed.” “You may also be thinking that — if you’re Xi — that you could use the same logic to decapitate and control Taiwan. Or why couldn’t Putin use that argument — same argument, it’s a threat — to grab the rest of Ukraine or go beyond into other former Soviet states? Have you created a precedent that you may come to regret later on?” “No, because this was a real threat. You didn’t have people pouring into China. You didn’t have drugs pouring into China. You didn’t have all of the bad things that we’ve had. You didn’t have the jails of Taiwan opened up and the people pouring into China. There aren’t that many people in the jails, but you didn’t have hundreds of thousands of people coming from jails and mental institutions pouring into China, Taiwan, pouring, pouring into Russia.” “Xi would tell you, Taiwan’s a threat to China, that it’s a separatist operation.” “It’s a source of pride for him. He considers it to be a part of China, and that’s up to him what he’s going to be doing. But I’ve expressed to him that I would be very unhappy if he did that, and I don’t think he’ll do that. I hope he doesn’t do that.” “So you don’t think you’ve set a precedent in other countries?” “He may do it after we have a different president, but I don’t think he’s going to do it with me as president.”