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| DATE | 2020-10-18 |
| FROM | aviva
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| SUBJECT | Re: [Hangout - NYLXS] [ Docs ] Why Covid-19 became so bad - the
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This is Linderman in action ~~~
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interview/peter-navarro/
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Peter Navarro serves as assistant to the president and director of the
Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy. In March 2020, President Trump
appointed him to coordinate the government’s use of the Defense
Production Act to respond to the coronavirus pandemic.
The following interview was conducted by Juliet Linderman on August 14,
2020, for the FRONTLINE film /America’s Medical Supply Crisis/
.
It is being published as part of the series' Transparency Project
and has been edited for clarity.
Video Interview: The transcript below is interactive. Select any
sentence to play the video. Highlight text to share it.
Offshore Manufacturing Dangers
So you have been talking about the potential dangers of U.S.
manufacturing moving offshore for a very long time before the president
was elected, largely on this issue. Is this the type of scenario you
were worried about?
No. This is the type of scenario I was worried about on steroids. Let me
talk about what I was looking at during the 2000s. I saw, primarily, the
Chinese Communist Party engaged in all manner of unfair trade practices
designed to take us apart and the world apart, whether it was sweatshop
labor, pollution havens, massive subsidies, the use of state-owned
enterprises to attack our sectors. What I was concerned about was the
loss of our manufacturing base in smaller and medium-sized communities
where they would be hollowed out and we would be left with an economy
which could not grow fast and which could not generate wage increases,
and, as a collateral damage, we would have a defense industrial base
which simply could not defend us. Now, up to Donald Trump, that's
exactly what we were getting, and all the opioid addiction and
alcoholism and crime on top of that.
Well, I'd like to just kind of stay focused on COVID-19.
This is a different kind of danger. What we have now is a world which
has basically pulled offshore the bulk of our manufacturing capacity for
personal protective equipment, for medical supplies, for medical
equipment like ventilators. And for pharmaceuticals in particular, our
foreign pharmaceutical dependence is astronomical. It's the key starting
materials that make the active pharmaceutical ingredients that go into
our finished dosage form: capsules, tablets and injectables. All three
phases of that manufacturing process are in places like China and India
and Ireland, all for a different set of reasons, and this pandemic has
shone a bright light on the dangers, because something like over 80
countries during this pandemic has put some form of export restrictions
on what we need as a country to protect our public health.
And that's why we're using the Defense Production Act so aggressively to
right that problem.
PPE
And we'll get to the DPA in just a couple of minutes, but let's talk
about what's happening on the ground across the United States right now.
We are months into this pandemic, and we are still seeing health care
workers, doctors, really people on the front lines, going to work every
day without the personal protective equipment that they so desperately
need. 11At the time of the interview in August 2020, the FDA identified
a shortage of PPE, ranging from gowns to gloves and more. See: FDA
article
I would challenge you on that in the following sense, because I'm very
actively engaged with HHS and FEMA building up the Strategic National
Stockpile. Our version is what we call 2.0. What we inherited from the
Obama-Biden administration was essentially an empty cupboard. 22The
history of the National Strategic Stockpile can be found at the
following link. In it, it describes usage during both Obama-Biden and
Trump-Pence's time in office. The last event requiring the stockpile was
Hurricane Irma in 2019. See: Department of Health & Human Services
article When this
pandemic started, we had very little to fight it with, and it wasn't
organized intelligently or strategically. We are in a position now,
using things like the Defense Production Act, where we're well on our
way by the end of September to filling that stockpile. At the same time,
every time we get a request, every time we get a request now from a
hospital anywhere around the country, we will endeavor to fill it
immediately. These stories that we're seeing in the press, we push back
on them every day. We have what we need to get to people what they need,
and the only problem there would ever be would be some lack of
communication, but we've got what people need.
So do you dispute these reports from nurses and doctors?
You would have to show me your exact report; we will look at it. We
run—every day at 11:00 a.m., we come in with what happened over the last
24 hours, and one section of that report is all of the stories that
would make claims about maybe we're not getting something somewhere. And
what we do is, first of all, check the veracity of it, and if it's true,
we get planes in the air or trucks. I have tremendous ability. I can
move stuff in hours out of the warehouses, and I've done that multiple
times. So yeah, you're dealing with anecdotes, not the true story, at
this point in time.
Very clearly—
Yes.
—do you think that there is enough PPE right now, in this country, for
nurses and doctors?
Yes, I do. If you just simply look at all the production that we're
engaged in, we're net filling the Strategic National Stockpile. Like I
say, if there's a hospital around the country that needs something, let
us know. If there's a distributor—the way this works also is you've got
the stockpile, and then that goes to a distributor like Cardinal or
McKesson, and then they are able to get it to the hospitals or
physicians. We feel like, based on what we've done with the Defense
Production Act under President Trump's leadership, that we've made great
strides. Now, going forward—
I just want to ask you one thing. [HHS Assistant Secretary for
Preparedness and Response] Dr. [Robert] Kadlec in March estimated that
we were going to need about 3.5 billion N95s if this reaches pandemic
status, which obviously it has. 33You can review this remark by watching
Dr. Kadlec's testimony, specifically starting from 1:57:25 here,
responding to Sen. Romney's question: Full Committee Hearing
We
spoke to FEMA, and they told us that we are producing something like 160
million N95 masks a month, but that still doesn't equal 3.5 billion, so
I just want to ask you, have you adjusted those numbers?
I would caution you that if you're citing projections in March, and
we're sitting here in August, that you might want to get an August
projection. What I'm telling you is that by the end—and this is all in
the report that I issued today—by the end of September, we will have a
Strategic National Stockpile that's very full. But look, we are at war.
Let's make no mistake about that. This is a war against a deadly virus
from China that looks like the Chinese Communist Party either let slip
out of that country or had something to do with it, and in fighting that
war, we are sparing no expense in terms of getting the weapons we need
to fight it. 44The Trump administration has presented no evidence that
the Chinese government intentionally spread the virus. Critics object to
the term "China virus" as racist and political.
Defense Production Act
OK. Well, let's talk about the Defense Production Act.
Sure.
You issued a report just today about it. Why don't you tell me a little
bit about what it is and how it's being used?
The Defense Production Act goes back to 1950, after World War II. During
World War II, we had DPA-like authorities to mobilize the defense
industrial base. Today's DPA has three main authorities to get stuff
done. You've got Title I, which allows you to prioritize orders so that
if a manufacturer of a critical piece of PPE needs something from the
supply chain, they can grab it ahead of the line of some noncritical
industries. That's a tremendously important tool. Title III is basically
a funding mechanism to stand up the kinds of factories that we need in
order to meet our PPE needs, our testing needs, the things we need for
vaccines such as vials. And we've used that repeatedly, so Title III is
very, very important. And the way that works in terms of spending
things, sometimes it's just long-term purchase commitments; sometimes
it's some grant money to stand up some investment first and then to
produce, but the strategy behind all of this as we do this is to bring
our medicines, our medical supplies and our medical equipment supply
chains home to America. We must do that. We will beat this pandemic. We
will beat it, but we cannot forget the lesson, the key lesson, which is
we need to bring our pharma home and our equipment home. …
Right, I understand. A common refrain from critics has been that the DPA
hasn't been used enough and that it wasn't used soon enough. What's your
response to that?
So on the soon enough, that's counterfactual. If you look at the
executive orders, they begin in March quite aggressively. We had six
executive orders and four presidential memorandum [sic] where we were
using it, so that's when that began. And in terms of aggressive enough,
this again is counterfactual, and I think it reflects a misunderstanding
of what the DPA actually can and should do. I think that in the
Biden-Pelosi-Democrat world—
Well—
Hang on. You're supposed to go in and seize factories and take over
production, but the DPA really doesn't entitle you to do that. Our
strategy has been, basically, to go in and use it forcefully when we've
had to, which primarily is the case in GM and 3M, and then let the rest
of corporate America understand that if they don't do what they should
do, we're coming after them, and that's been very effective. …
From the time that that action was taken, it was 17 days for that
factory to be stood up. That has never been done in American industrial
history. We put that factory up in 17 days using the miracle of
repurposing the platform of General Motors for autos. This was just like
World War II, when we took platforms for autos and turned them into
tanks, but this was done in 17 days.
Well, we spoke with Ventec, and they said that they were already working
on ramping up production without the DPA.
Nah, they were making 25 to 30 ventilators a week, and they had no hope
of going to the kind of scale that we went. 55Ventec was producing more
than 25 to 30 ventilators per week, according to an investigation
conducted by the New York Times. General Motors and Ventec formed a
partnership on March 19, the latter of which produces 200 per month, or
50 average per week. Ventec, on March 20, had allegedly already sped
production to up to 1,000 ventilators per month. As discussions between
the partners continued, and with GM's resources, they had planned to
accomplish 20,000 per month. See: New York Times
I want to pivot—
That is a miracle.
I want to pivot a little bit and talk about masks for a second.
Timeline
Can we talk one thing about timing? I'd like to talk a little bit about
this whole timing issue. …
The first major action that was taken on this was Jan. 31, which was
when the president courageously pulled down the flights from China. And
three days before, he'd already made that decision, and my task was to
go into the Situation Room and present the case for taking down the
flights.
Well, I don't really want to go there, only because I'd really like to
focus on supply chain issues here.
But you'll want to listen to this, OK, because it tells you what we were
doing in February. Do you want to hear that?
Yes, absolutely.
All right. Well, let me tell you what we were doing in February, because
come Jan. 31, the president pulls the flights down. 66The proclamation
to suspend entry of aliens coming from China went into effect February
2. See: Presidential Proclamations on Novel Coronavirus
Jan.
28, I had gone into the Situation Room, knowing he was going to do that,
to make the case. The memo—I think you've seen the memo that I wrote,
warning of a global pandemic, OK? In February, we weren't sure what was
going to happen with the China virus. We didn't know how bad it was
going to be, but privately, president's direction to me was prepare for
the worst. I was working day and night with people over at BARDA
[Biomedical Advance Research and Development Authority] and other people
in the bureaucracy, and we were getting ready, in that month, in
February, we were getting ready to put out contracts for what would
become the vaccine horse race. We were getting ready to put out
contracts to buy Remdesivir for clinical trials and to buy enough
Remdesivir for the American people. We were getting ready to put out
contracts for things like vials and things like that. So all the work
that we were doing in February laid the groundwork for the contracts
that would be issued March, April, May, June, July and now August. These
things don't happen overnight.
Well, let's focus in February.
Sure.
You wrote a memo here, and it was a request for immediate action, and it
was on Feb. 9, and you said that action needed to be immediately
undertaken, and "immediately" is twice in all caps, and you recommend
halting the export of N95 masks and ramping up production of domestic
N95 factories—
And what we did—
But neither of those things happened until April.
What we did there, working with HHS and BARDA, was we set in motion all
of those contracts that would be signed.
But why did they take two months?
Well, I'll question your two months thing. The one you're seeing there
say two months. There's other contracts that have been signed outside
the scope of that, but I can assure you we were moving as early as the
beginning of February, lining all this stuff up, and remember—now hang
on. Just remember, Nancy Pelosi was still dancing in Chinatown without a
mask saying that there was no problem. 77Speaker of the House Nancy
Pelosi was not "dancing" in Chinatown, but she did visit San Francisco's
Chinatown on February 24, 2020 encouraging locals and tourists not to
avoid going due to coronavirus concerns. Local shop-owners believed the
downturn in visits was "racially motivated," according to a NBC Bay Area
report. NBC Bay Area
I
know you don't want to hear that on this program, but in February, there
was this blissful ignorance. The two people that mattered most around
here in February who knew that could be the contrary was the president
himself and me, and his direction to me was crystal clear, "Get moving
on this in case it's bad." And so history will show—and there's many
more memos than the ones that got leaked, and shame on the leakers, that
show that we were on top of this game, and everything that we did in
February when we weren't sure what the virus was going to be in terms of
degree of severity bore fruit in the later months.
But a week after this memo, you wrote another one, and you were still
asking questions about why the exports weren't being halted.
The purpose of those memos were to continue to mobilize the bureaucracy,
OK? I have an expression I call "Trump time," which is to say, "Move as
quickly as possible." And the problem that we have had here in the White
House, and every president has, is a bureaucracy of career bureaucrats
who are set in their ways and don't know how to move in Trump time. But
I'll tell you what: This whole vaccine thing, it's worth talking about
the vaccine development, OK?
Yeah.
Here's what we did.
Well, hang on. I actually just want to pause for one second, though.
Sure.
Who's really in charge of the DPA and making those decisions, though?
That's not the bureaucracy; that's the president, and he—
The president of the United States is in charge of the DPA, and we
started that process on March 18—
Hang on. I just have one question. March 18, though—
—before the World Health Organization said we were in a pandemic. Before.
But March 18, that's weeks after you were warning about this, and I
think he said something like that it would be used—
I'm not going with this narrative. What I'm trying to tell you and
you're not listening is that we were working very hard to put in motion
everything we did with the DPA as early as—the starting gun in this
crisis was Jan. 31, when the president pulled down those flights, and we
were working 24/7. I'm sitting on a weekend in my office in this
building with three other guys; we're trying to get the ventilator thing
done. We're talking in one day to 12, almost a dozen ventilator
manufacturers. And guess what? No American was denied a ventilator,
number one. 88According to a Guardian report, doctors across the U.S.
were forced to develop ethical frameworks to decide who would get access
to ventilators due to mass shortages. See: The Guardian
Number
two, we went from in a shortage position now to being the export
ventilator king because of the way we move in Trump time, so I'm not
buying these criticisms. It's like, "You move too slow." What I'm trying
to give you is information to the American public about what we were
doing in February, which set up all the good things that happened in the
later months.
The Challenges of Bringing Medical Manufacturing Back
… You have spoken about bringing medical manufacturing back to the U.S.,
and it's actually kind of become a bipartisan issue at this point.
Not kind of—it is a bipartisan issue, I believe, although the Democrats
talk but don't walk the talk.
Do you think that it can really happen, as an economist?
It's already happening. Look, the president—and he's the only person
who's ever stood up to China in the Oval Office. And what's been
happening in the last three and a half years—and we've seen this—is
supply chains moving back to America for a whole variety of things. What
this China virus pandemic has done is shine a really bright light on the
fact that we're dangerously dependent on the Chinese Communist Party for
antibiotics, for all sorts of masks, equipment, and we know that they,
in terms of times of crisis, will hoard that stuff. So yes, I think that
we have a commitment now to bring that back.
But I'll tell you what: The worst thing we can do is forget what
happened here. Joe Biden and Barack Obama, in their administration, had
a wake-up call with the H1N1 virus, OK? What they should have done after
that was on-shore all our N95 respirators, and instead, you know what
they did? They sent them to Mexico and China so that they could buy them
3 cents less.
But that's interesting that you bring up H1N1. We have talked to some
companies that ramped up during H1N1, and then they felt abandoned
because there weren't guarantees of purchasing that product later, so is
this—
They were abandoned, and I know who you talked to.
Is this administration committed to—
Yes
—guaranteeing a certain amount of orders for companies that are prepared
to ramp up?
The whole strategy has to be long-term commitments from the
administration, but that won't do it alone. So if you think about
pharmaceuticals—this is really interesting. Right now the disadvantage
we have in the pharmaceutical space is in traditional manufacturing, the
three-stage process, it goes to the slave labor, the pollution havens
and the tax havens, boom, out. The only way we get our cost advantage
back is by bringing home and developing advanced and continuous
manufacturing. That is a process where you do all three stages at once
or at least two out of three that reduces the waste drain, that reduces
the cost, and voila, we're competitive. We need to be innovative and
competitive on the one hand, but we also have to have the commitment as
a government for these long-term commitments. …
We were talking about the challenges of bringing manufacturing back to
the U.S. How can it happen? You're an economist, right? Prestige
Ameritech has told us that they could buy a Chinese mask for less than
the cost of materials for them, so isn't it just a numbers game?
Well, that's what China does; they dump products into our markets.
That's how they stole all our jobs. Remember how during the 2000s—this
was on Bush's watch, Obama and Biden—what China did was basically dump
products into our markets, kill our factories. Seventy thousand
factories we lost, 5 million manufacturing jobs, during that time. In
order for us to bring our pharma home, we've got to do a bunch of
things. The president just signed an essential medicines executive order
just a couple of weeks ago. What does that do? It's pure Trump. It's
"Buy American" so that Defense Department, Veterans Affairs and Health
and Human Services are directed to buy their pharmaceuticals from
domestic manufacturers. "Buy American" is a critical part of this
administration. The second thing, which is pure Trump, is the
deregulation portion. Now, don't let that scare Americans. We're not
going to do anything dangerous. What this does is simply bring the FDA
into a world where their regulatory processes have to work with these
new advanced manufacturing processes. They're not built for that right
now. And the third part of that is the innovation, which is to move
advanced manufacturing forward.
You've got the "Buy American" portion of it; you've got the expenditures
we're making with long-term commitments, 10 years, 15 years out, so
these companies will have a firm commitment to it. We are also, with the
Strategic National Stockpile, we have a smart stockpile this time. We're
not only adding more materiel to the stockpile, but we're expanding its
capacity by going first to the distributors to have them maintain
reserve capacity. It's kind of like electric power plant notion, where
you have some kind of spinning reserves that you can bring online. And
then the same thing with the hospitals, so everybody holds more
inventory. You do a first-in, first-out so the stuff remains fresh. So
we're attacking this. What the Trump administration does is it attacks
it like a businessperson would from multiple vectors of attack with the
goal of having the jobs here, the factories here and Americans safe. …
Ventilators
So I want to go back to ventilators for a second.
Sure.
You mentioned really being involved in ventilators.
Yes.
We've been looking at one particular contract, the ventilator contract
with Philips, and we understand that it was negotiated first under the
Obama administration, and those ventilators that were ordered were never
actually delivered to the SNS, and that contract was renegotiated—
Those were a prototype that were supposed to be very cheap ventilators
that never got done because some company bought the company. Is that the
one you're talking about? I don't want to— What I don't want to do is
comment on stuff unless you give me very specific things. What I can say
to you about—
The criticism has been that this administration is allowing taxpayers to
pay five times more for what is functionally the same ventilator as the
previous—
See, that's—
No, no. And this is coming from a congressional report, so—
Of course. It's a Democratic congressional report. It's pure—
But you're a negotiator, so I just want to ask you what really happened,
because I know that you had a seat at the table, and I wanted to give
you a chance to tell us.
Sure. The first thing that happened is the Democrats want to blame
Donald J. Trump for the pandemic, and they don't want to have this
election run on legitimate issues about what the American people want,
which is the economy standing up to China and law and order in our
cities. They want to basically make the pandemic, so they do letters
like this. Let me tell you about ventilators. All ventilators are not
created equal, right? You have some smaller portable ventilators, and
then you have the Cadillac, General Electric $43,000 one, which will
stay on through 14 days in an ICU unit. It lasts the whole 14 days
without any change. And everywhere in between, you have variations on
that theme. You can't compare the price of this ventilator with that
ventilator without controlling for their functionality, OK?
So you're saying they're very different.
They're very different, yes.
OK, because the report says they function the same.
And so what I love about the GM Ventec one—and I went to the factory to
actually visit it and look at it—is, to me, it's one of the most elegant
designs. It runs about $15,000, but even that ventilator doesn't have
the full functionality of the GE one. You'd love to have all GE ones,
but at $43,000, that's expensive, and it also takes much longer to
produce, so what we're trying to do across—it's kind of like a hedge
portfolio that someone would have in their 401K, right? I think it's
somewhere, at least, nine, 10, different types of producers, and they
produce different ventilators with different functionalities. Look, memo
to anybody reading a letter from Congress that's totally partisan. Guess
what? That's partisan.
Can you tell me when you think those Philips ventilators will be delivered?
Which Philips—I don't know which ones you're talking about. I do know
that Philips has been producing some ventilators along with— …
One criticism for this Philips contract is that Philips got several
extensions, and so those ventilators aren't expected to be delivered
until 2022. 99In response to written questions by the Associated Press,
Philips said they have delivered 1,700 ventilators of the original 2014
contract.The company said the delays were due to "software development
issues…” discovered during testing, and "FDA… clearance… which took
longer than anticipated.”
I can't comment on the—to me, that's just garbage stuff. That's just
typical Democratic B.S. They're playing politics with the lives of the
American people. Stop that. Stop that. And so all I can tell you is
we've become—
Well, it's taxpayer money, though. It's—
Yeah, but let's also be clear about one thing. When Gov. Cuomo, with his
hair on fire, started screaming on national television that he needed
40,000 ventilators more than we had in the Strategic National Stockpile,
he did tremendous damage to this country, because all the 49 other
states started getting crazy about ventilators, and there was real fear
on the part of the American people. 1010Early in the pandemic, Andrew
Cuomo told NBC's Lester Holt that experts had predicted New York would
need "40,000 ICU beds with ventilators." See: NBC News
Guess
what? Guess what? We are now the ventilator king of the world. We're
shipping ventilators not just for export for money, but we're giving
them to our friends and allies. 1111ProPublica in July reported that the
U.S. had donated thousands to ventilators to foreign countries. See:
ProPublica
You don't think there's an urgency for it?
Is what?
You don't think there's an urgency for these orders to be delivered
before 2022?
These orders? No. We're in great shape with ventilators. And it's not
clear to me that we haven't got some now. I don't know the particulars
of the con—you're just sitting there with papers saying, "Philips,
Philips, Philips," and that's not fair to me.
I'm sorry. This is the invoice that was sent, if you want to look at it.
It's from the congressional report, but it is addressed to you.
I will not go there. What I would do, if you want, is next time you want
to do an interview with me, have the courtesy of giving me the material
to study beforehand, because that's just a cheap shot. "Oh, here's the—" …
No, no, no, not a cheap shot at all. I was asking to explain what really
happened—
Cheap shot.
—because there's been a lot of criticism, and I was giving you a chance
to tell us what really happened.
But you're dwelling on something that's tiny in the scheme of things,
and that's why I always worry about these kind of interviews, because if
the American people really want to know what's happening, it's not what
may or may not be happening with a single contract with Philips, because
that's just pure political B.S., OK? That's all you're doing here. You
want to play that game and put it on the air, fine. But put this on the
air: That's just B.S. There's a lot of other things that the American
people need to know about, which I've shared with you in the course of
this interview, so I'll say the same thing I said to 60 Minutes. If you
want to put stuff like that in there, air the whole interview so people
can see the whole thing. …
I'm serious about that. You do stuff like that, and I want the whole
interview up on the web. Let's do that. You shouldn't have anything to
fear from that. Let's do it.
No—
FRONTLINE actually does have a Transparency Project, and if you're
saying you're going to sit here and answer our questions, then I will
talk to our executive producer about putting this whole thing on.
Yeah.
Put it on. …
I just want to get my papers straight. Thank you so much. I really
appreciate you staying.
Well, I do enjoy watching your program. I've watched you for decades, I
think, but there's always the concern about fairness, but we'll see what
happens.
You famously accused China of nationalizing 3M, so we wanted to ask you
where that came from. 1212In a Fox News segment from February, Navarro
said China had effectively nationalized 3M to prevent its sending any
material to the United States. See: Fox Business
Well, that's what they did. What China— What the Chinese Communist
Party, to be clear, did was restrict 3M from exporting their N95 masks
outside of China to America. That was done, OK? And the bigger 3M issue,
which I think is interesting, goes to the problem that I call the
Vatican problem. There's too many American multinational corporations
who think they're the Vatican; they're their own separate nation, where
they have clients in America, in China, all over the world, either
producing or consuming, and from their perspective as executives, their
role is to balance all of those interests rather than serve the American
nation in time of need. And so the problem we had with 3M, which
required a Defense Production Act order, was that they were
simultaneously trying to play some games with where their masks were
going. At the same time, they were in a vise put on them by the Chinese
Communist Party, so we had to handle those problems in two different ways.
The first way was to use the DPA to order them to give us an allotment
of masks, and they were able to dramatically both increase the allotment
of existing capacity but also stand up new capacity. The second— The
other problem we had where the Chinese government, the Chinese Communist
Party, was putting the screws to 3M is we handled that through diplomacy
very successfully. I would say that that was a beautiful case of how
this administration works, where we came, again, a multi-vector attack.
Well, we spoke to 3M, and they completely disagree that it was
nationalization. They said that the Chinese government requested
preference and a higher degree of engagement in addressing the orders
for everything we were shipping out of the Shanghai facility—
Memo to FRONTLINE here: This is why we had to do the DPA order on them.
They are the slipperiest people that I’ve dealt with in this White House
in terms of getting to yes on things, so if they're spinning it that
way, they can go ahead and spin it, but I'm telling you flat out that
the Chinese Communist Party, both at the federal level and at the local
level, I think it was in Shanghai, was prohibiting those masks from
leaving China. 1313Chinese officials did delay mask and ventilator
exports in April after quality complaints from Europe, The New York
Times reported. Delays were tied to a new inspection policy. See: New
York Times
And
we had—no, we had to deal with that diplomatically, and we had to deal
with it with the DPA, and I'm telling you, I don't care what 3M says,
that's what happened. 1414A 3M executive told the AP: "What did happen
is the Shanghai municipal government came to 3M and requested preference
and a higher degree of engagement in addressing the orders for
everything that we were shipping out of the Shanghai facility."
But is that different than the functions of the DPA that say that we can
block exports of masks from our country?
What that does is it underscores with an exclamation point why we have
to have this production here, why we have to have it here. And we've
been very, very good about working with other countries of the world in
terms of sharing what there is to make sure people stay alive. But the
fact of the matter is, over 80 countries put export restrictions of some
kind on the rest of the world, and this is a dog-eat-dog world when it's
a pandemic, and that's what we need to understand. And that's why I get
back to this president, Donald J. Trump, toughest president we've ever
had since Ronald Reagan, and he's handling this with a combination of
toughness using the DPA, diplomacy behind the scenes, and our mission is
to protect the American people from the China virus, and that's what
happened with 3M. And I don't care what else you say they said; I've
told you what happened.
Convincing American Companies to Come Back
How are you going to convince American companies to come back from China?
Well, we don't have to convince them to come back from China. China took
a fork in the road first in 2008, when they overplayed their hand in
this whole hide-your-capabilities, bide-your-time strategy, going back
to Deng Xiaoping. They threw that in the garbage can, and they started
getting really aggressive with the rest of the world. Xi Jìnpíng comes
along, and he's doing just crazy stuff like this Civil-Military Fusion.
Have you heard of this? Do you know what this doctrine is?
Well—
Do you know what that is? Civil-Military Fusion is a doctrine that says
that anything a company has, foreign or domestic, on Chinese soil, in
terms of data, trade secrets, whatever, must be given on demand to the
Chinese Communist Party. And that is the single most important thing
that's chilling new investment in the People's Republic of China. Yeah,
people are coming back in droves to this country because of President
Trump's policies and because they're afraid of the Chinese Communist Party.
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