Former president Donald Trump reportedly told former secretary of state Mike Pompeo to “shut the hell up for a while” about Beijing’s Covid response, which Pompeo alleged was dishonest and manipulative, so as not to upset Chinese president Xi Jinping.
Listening in to a March 26, 2020, call from Xi, Pompeo heard him warn Trump that the secretary was threatening the nations’ joint “phase one” trade agreement with his rhetoric casting blame on China for the pandemic. Pompeo detailed the memory in his new memoir, Never Give An Inch, which Semafor obtained and analyzed.
On March 25, one day before the phone conversation, Pompeo urged the leaders of the G-7 to hang responsibility for the disease on China and call it the “Wuhan virus.” The World Health Organization argued against a localized name, given its cross-continent spread. In the months after the pandemic emerged, Pompeo alleged that China was not being transparent and was gatekeeping valuable information about the origins of Covid.
Pompeo suspected that Xi was trying to pressure Trump to fire him, he indicated in his memoir, according to Semafor. “My Mike, that fucking guy hates you!” Trump said. A few days later, Trump accused Pompeo of “putting us all at risk” by antagonizing China’s authoritarian head, in part because the U.S. depended on the country for medical supplies.
“Stop, for God’s sake!” Trump reportedly said.
Pompeo said he obliged the president, acknowledging that he had to play diplomacy while the U.S. relied on Chinese health-care products.
“We needed health equipment and were at the CCP’s mercy for it,” Pompeo said in his account. “I worked for the president, and would bide my time.”
Since leaving office, Trump has railed against China’s growing influence and adversarial posturing toward the U.S. He shared a foreign-policy plan with the New York Post, released Wednesday, that would involve enacting “aggressive new restrictions on Chinese ownership of any vital infrastructure in the United States.” Sectors such as energy, technology, telecommunications, farmland, natural resources, medical supplies, and other strategic national assets would be limited to Chinese access under his administration, Trump promised.
Trump was, Pompeo suggests, much more amiable toward China at the peak of the pandemic, when he evidently felt the U.S. was beholden to the country. In the memoir, Pompeo reportedly cites a January 2020 tweet in which Trump expresses gratitude to China for its collaboration in curbing the pandemic.
“China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!” Trump tweeted at the time.
“I was not happy that the president had tweeted that,” Pompeo wrote in the memoir.