Republican presidential nominee, former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign event on food security in a barn on the Smith Family Farm on September 23, 2024 in Smithton, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)
A few hours before he took the stage at a rally at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, former President Donald Trump was the featured guest at a roundtable in Smithton, Westmoreland County on Monday, where the topic of discussion was the influence of China on U.S. agriculture.
The roundtable in a Smithton barn was hosted by the Protecting America Initiative, an organization run by former Trump administration official Richard Grenell. The group calls itself “a coalition of concerned American citizens and public policy experts who are committed to stopping Chinese influence in the states.”
“Nobody’s done for farmers what I’ve done,” Trump said at the beginning of the hour-long discussion.
While Trump boasted about his administration’s work on agriculture, he claimed that the Biden-Harris administration was not holding China accountable in regards to agriculture and promised that he’d call President Xi Jinping to honor a previous deal he made with him in 2019.
“So the first thing I’d do is I would probably, my first call, I’m going to call up President Xi, I’m going to say, you have to honor the deal you made,” Trump said. “We made a deal you’d buy $50 billion worth of American farm product. And I guarantee you he will buy it. 100% he will buy it.”
The second thing Trump said he would do during the phone call with Xi, is tell China it has to give the death penalty to fentanyl dealers in their country who are sending fentanyl overseas. Trump said that the fentanyl from China is coming through the United States southern border.
A Sept. 22 report on CBS’s 60 Minutes detailed the current situation with fentanyl, reporting that “nearly all the fentanyl flooding into the U.S. is made in Mexico by two powerful drug cartels, with chemicals primarily purchased from China.”
Farmers who spoke at the roundtable told Trump about the impact that inflation was having on their day-to-day operations, and expressed concern about China purchasing more farmland in the U.S.
Trump also repeated his stance on the pending sale of Pittsburgh-based U.S. Steel to Japan-based Nippon Steel.
“I wouldn’t let it happen,” he said. “I’d help them so they can make the steel company good again.”
During a visit to Pittsburgh on Sept. 2, Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president said she believes U.S. Steel should remain an American-owned company, a position President Joe Biden holds as well.. “It is vital for our nation to maintain a strong American steel company,” Harris said
Although China was the intended focus of the conversation, Trump also discussed implementing high tariffs on businesses that move to Mexico, specifically naming manufacturing company John Deere.
“They’ve announced a few days ago that they’re going to move a lot of their manufacturing business to Mexico,” Trump said. “I’m just notifying John Deere right now. If you do that, we’re putting a 200% tariff on everything that you want to sell into the United States, so that, if I win, John Deere is going to be paying 200%.”
The company recently announced plans to move some of its production from Iowa to Mexico.
As he has with most of his campaign appearances in Pennsylvania this cycle and during previous elections, Trump promised to protect the fracking industry and pointed to past comments Harris made her previous presidential run that she wanted to end fracking. However, during her campaign for president, Harris has said she doesn’t want to ban fracking and reiterated the point during their debate earlier this month.
Grenell and former U.S. Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY), both senior advisors for the Protecting American Initiative, hosted the event. Dave McCormick, Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, also spoke and said he would go to bat for farmers, if elected, by taking on China.
Also present at the roundtable discussion was U.S. Rep. G.T. Thompson (R-15th District), who is the Chair of the House Committee on Agriculture, and state Rep. Dan Moul (R-Adams), Minority chair of the Pennsylvania House Agriculture and Rural Affairs Committee, and Pennsylvania state Senate President Pro Tempore Kim Ward (R-Westmoreland).
The Harris campaign released a statement saying that Trump was not an ally to farmers during his first term and a second term would be even worse.
“Despite all his lies and pandering, Donald Trump used the White House to give handouts to wealthy corporations and foreign companies at the expense of family farmers, drive farm bankruptcies to record levels, and sacrifice small American farmers as pawns in his failed trade war with China,” Harris-campaign spokesperson Joseph Costello said in a statement.
Harris, he added, “believes in investing in rural America and creating the opportunity for working families to get ahead, with middle class tax cuts, support for small farmers so they can compete, and an aggressive plan to hold Big Ag accountable when they rip off consumers.”
This is a developing story that will be updated