During a Fox News broadcast on Sunday, former United States (US) president Donald Trump criticised the Biden administration’s move to boycott the upcoming Beijing Winter Olympics due to China’s human rights abuses in the Xinjiang region, saying it “almost makes us look like, I don’t know, sore losers.”
In the interview with anchor Maria Bartiromo, Trump explained his disapproval of America’s diplomatic boycott, saying, “There are much more powerful things we can do than that, much, much more powerful things. That’s not a powerful thing.” When asked whether he would do the same, Trump replied, “No because, I watched Jimmy Carter do it, and it was terrible. It was terrible. It hurts the athletes,” referring to the US-led boycott of the 1980 Olympics. In 1980, the US led 66 other countries to boycott the Olympics in Moscow over the Soviet-Afghanistan war. The Soviet Union and its closest allies boycotted the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles in retaliation.
Later in the interview, Trump lauded his relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping during his tenure. “You know, I had a great relationship with President Xi. I really believe he liked me, and I liked him,” he said.
Bartiromo stressed that the Chinese president was a “killer” concerning the treatment of Uyghur Muslims, which has been labelled as a “genocide” by some US politicians. Trump responded, “He is a killer, but I had a great relationship with him.”
However, Trump criticised China’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and claimed that Beijing has “economically been ripping us off for many years.”
Trump’s remarks come in light of America’s deteriorating relationship with China. Although the two countries collaborated on shared climate interests during the COP26 summit, Washington and Beijing have had difficulty finding common ground in other areas.
Earlier this month, the Biden administration announced a diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics, citing “egregious” human rights abuses of the Uyghur Muslim minority in China’s Xinjiang region. Both Republican and Democrat politicians supported the move, calling it a necessary step in standing up against China’s continuing abuse of human rights.
Beijing responded by calling the boycott a political manipulation tactic and threatened Washington with “serious countermeasures.”
Additionally, last week, the US government blacklisted eight Chinese firms for helping the military with “biometric surveillance and tracking” of ethnic minorities such as Tibetans and Uyghurs. In another attack on China, the US Senate passed the Uyghur Forced Labour Prevention Act that bans imported goods from the Xinjiang region unless companies prove their goods were not made with slave labour.