As I track U.S. presidential candidates' statements on trade policy, I'm not always going to offer commentary. Sometimes I'll just post the full text, as part of an effort to document everything being said. Here is Ron DeSantis talking to Maria Bartiromo on Fox News last weekend:
DeSantis:
I think we need to recognize [that] this experiment with the CCP over the last three decades where they were granted most favored nation status, put in the World Trade Organization, you know, that's been a failure. We need independence from China. We cannot subcontract out key aspects of our industrial base to a country that doesn't have our interests at heart and that is our number one geopolitical threat, and we will get that done as well.
Bartiromo:
And yet, Janet Yellen just went to China and bowed to Communist Party officials; a couple of weeks after Antony Blinken pretty much did the same. What are you going to do to stop this aggression from communist China in your first week in office then? Give us specifics that you want to change with regard to the relationship with China. Will you reverse the most favored nation trade status on China? What else can be done?
DeSantis:
So I favor doing that. I think we probably need Congress, but I would take executive action as appropriate to be able to move us in that direction. Too, I would recognize that China's a threat. This idea of the happy talk that you hear from Yellen, oh, we're just, you know, it's a healthy competition. No, they're the number one geopolitical threat this country faces. And what we're gonna do is we're going to have a new commitment to hard power in the Indo Pacific. At the end of the day, what China respects is strength. And if you're showing strength and we have hard power to back it up, they're going to be much less aggressive ...
