Tim Kaine pounced Thursday on a suggestion made by Donald Trump in which the GOP presidential nominee said he would be willing to cut off US relations with China if it put his business interests at risk.
In an interview Wednesday with KSNV’s Jim Snyder ahead of his Henderson, Nevada, rally, Trump was asked if he was concerned a trade war would hurt his business in the United States.
“It will actually help. We’re just talking about fairness, not like tough like we’re not going to do business. We’re talking about tough so that the United States can make something,” Trump said.
Snyder followed up, asking how the businessman would respond if, hypothetically, “China said no more visas for our people to go to Las Vegas and stay at Trump Tower.”
“They’re not going to do it, because if China ever did that, and if we ever cut off relationships with China, China would go bust so fast. I mean, China lives off the money out of the United States. They devalue their currency and they take our businesses,” Trump said, adding that the United States has to improve relationships with China.
Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s running mate, rebuked Trump over that line Thursday.
“Someone asked him, an enterprising journalist, ‘Hey, if you start a trade war with China and they retaliate by denying visas to anyone who wants to go to Las Vegas and stay at Trump hotel, what will you do?’ He said we could cut off all relations to China and they’d go bust really fast,” Kaine said at a rally at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University.
“So this is a guy who says if they hurt his hotel business that he would cut off all relations with China. Is this the kind of guy you want in the Oval Office? A guy who will put his own bottom line ahead of America’s bottom line? Absolutely not.”
