(CNN)President Donald Trump spent Tuesday afternoon rambling at length about a series of unrelated topics after convening an event in the Rose Garden meant to announce new actions on China.
Trump announced those actions within a few minutes and said little about them. Instead, he launched into a partially scripted attack on his 2016 election rival that stretched into the early evening.
Frustrated at his inability to hold campaign rallies due to the surging coronavirus pandemic, Trump appeared to bring his rally speech to the White House instead.
He touched on immigration, policing, statues and monuments, trade and climate change, moving from ad-libbed musing to more scripted comments warning that presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden would “destroy our country.”
“We could go on for days,” Trump said midway through his address.
Before he launched into his blindly political speech, he said he was signing a bill and executive order punishing China for its actions in Hong Kong.
He also said he held Beijing responsible for concealing coronavirus at the start of a now-global pandemic and “unleashing it upon the world.”
“Could have stopped it,” Trump said, “They should have stopped it.”
At the start of July, the US Senate approved a final version of legislation that would punish China for moves that lawmakers fear will crush democratic freedoms in Hong Kong.
The measure would impose sanctions on businesses and individuals that help China restrict Hong Kong’s autonomy. It was approved by unanimous consent and has been awaiting Trump’s signature.
Trump said his executive order would end preferential treatment for Hong Kong.
“Hong Kong will now be treated the same as mainland China,” he said. “No special privileges, no special economic treatment and no export of sensitive technologies.”
The announcements came during a late-afternoon Rose Garden event that was added to the President’s schedule a few hours earlier.
The President has faced growing pressure to adopt a tougher stance on China as the country exerts new control over Hong Kong and as its handling of the coronavirus comes under scrutiny.
The issue has become a leading election year topic as Trump and Biden each attempt to paint the other as weak in the face of aggression from Beijing. Both sides have used the issue in campaign ads.
Trump has stated he is unhappy with the country but that he’s not yet planning to scrap the trade agreement he struck with Chinese President Xi Jinping last year.
“I think what China has done to the world with what took place — the China plague, you can call it the China virus; you can call it whatever you want to call it, it’s about 20 different names — what they did to the world should not be forgotten,” Trump said Monday at a policing roundtable.
On Monday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced a formal rejection of “most” of China’s maritime claims in the South China Sea, the latest in the escalation between Washington and Beijing.
Last week, the Trump administration took action against Chinese officials for their involvement in human rights abuses in the Xinjiang region, where Uyghur Muslims and other minority groups have been detained and tortured.
And two weeks ago, the administration announced visa restrictions on current and former Chinese officials who it says “were responsible for eviscerating Hong Kong’s freedoms.”
