Although President Donald Trump frequently talks about the importance of America standing up to China, he is using a bizarre new stunt to deflect from his close relationship with a high-ranking AI executive alleged to be a Chinese spy.
“”I didn’t hear about it then,” Trump said when asked whether Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is a Chinese spy, as reports indicate he might be. “But a lot of people have heard about it. And Jensen totally denies that. I spoke to him today, just to see if he’s feeling all right, how you doing. And I asked him about that. I asked him, “Did you have any idea that she was a spy?” He said, “I had no idea that she was a spy.” And I really believe him.”
At the conservative magazine The Bulwark, pundit Tim Miller laughed at Trump’s response.
“This one tickled me,” Miller told his colleague Sam Stein. “It was ridiculous. So his exoneration is that Jensen told him this person never told Jensen she was a spy? Was she supposed to say, ‘Hey Jensen, I just want you to know, I’m actually a spy’?”
He continued that “the whole thing is pretty strange, how excited Jensen was to give these high-powered chips to the Chinese. Maybe it was some special something he was getting from his mistress. The kids would say it’s possible he was – – – – by the Chinese.”
Miller then mentioned that Trump was asked directly about this by a conservative reporter.
“He was asked directly about that eventually by Meridith McGraw of the Wall Street Journal,” Miller told Stein. “Just to put a fine point on it, can you say precisely when you were briefed? There’s this intel report you were handed by Marco Rubio. Did you see it? And he said, well, you’ll have to ask the intel people about that one, I’m not totally sure. He kept saying other people had heard about it, which means he had heard about it.”
Stein responded, “It’s a pretty big deal. The idea that the Chinese had penetrated, so to speak, the biggest chip company in the country, with all the national security implications. That feels like the type of thing that would have risen to the President of the United States.”
Even though Trump has close business and political ties to the Chinese oligarch, he frequently uses China as a scapegoat, especially when he peddles his debunked claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
“Trump has long cast doubt on the security of U.S. elections, including by attacking mail-in voting and promoting baseless conspiracy theories of widespread fraud in previous elections,” reported Politico’s Dana Nickel and Maggie Miller on Thursday. “In July, he delivered a primetime address on election security, which included claims that China was behind massive interference efforts targeting past elections. None of the documents the White House released in July appear to support this claim.”