Donald Trump’s 2020 team poll-tested idea of expelling all Chinese scientists from US, new book says

Former US president Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign tested a number of bizarre and in some cases xenophobic ideas as his team sought to find a policy that sparked the kind of reaction like his 2015 plan to ban Muslims from entering the US, according to a new book.

According to This Will Not Pass, top Trump aides mused about giving Americans the ability to sue China in court and tested the reaction to expelling Chinese scientists from the US, and sending the National Guard into cities amid social unrest.

“John would send me these emails that went on for pages with these crazy f***ing questions. “I’d say to him: ‘Where are you getting these questions from?” Trump’s pollster Tony Fabrizio told the book’s authors, New York Times political reporters Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns.

It is unclear what questions he was referencing. A message left with Fabrizio’s polling firm was not immediately returned.

The specific wording about expelling Chinese scientists, according to the book, was would you “favour or oppose requiring all Chinese scientists, researchers, and technicians that are Chinese citizens to leave the US”.

The question underlines the extent to which some top Trump aides explored going to to antagonise China during the Covid-19 pandemic.

If that were to have occurred, the US would have gone further in punishing China that any action taken against the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Even as tensions were high at that time, Washington and Moscow still allowed for scientific and technological exchanges. Former diplomats and historians have praised those moves for helping ease tensions between the world’s two largest powers.

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The authors wrote that these “provocative, even outlandish polling questions” came from a “fluid” group of official and unofficial Trump aides. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich, one-time Clinton ally Dick Morris, and White House adviser Stephen Miller were all reportedly part of this group.

Gingrich told Insider in a brief interview that the reporting on the questions listed above “doesn’t sound right”. But he declined to get into detail about what questions he was involved with.

“We frankly looked at lots and lots of stuff,” he said.

Asked if he was involved with the question about banning Chinese citizens, Gingrich said he “very much believes you have to have a strong counter-intelligence effort under way and that particularly relates to China”. He added that the US treatment of Soviet scientists during the Cold War was a “reasonable model”.

Regarding Fabrizio’s comments, Gingrich said he and Trump’s pollster are close friends. The former House speaker expressed doubt that Fabrizio’s shock at “crazy f***ing questions” was directed at him.

“I don’t know what he was referring to,” Gingrich said. “Look, I’ve been involved in polling my entire career and if you want to you can go to AmericanMajorityProject.com and you will see tonnes of data. And I think that a lot of them are creative but none of them are crazy.”

But, the authors wrote, voters did not have a visceral reaction or even express broad support for the potential policies.

“In April polling, a majority of likely swing-state voters opposed cracking down on Chinese students and researchers. But, through the spring and summer, the far-out proposals only kept coming from Trump’s fluid circle of formal and informal advisers,” the authors wrote.

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Trump’s 2015 campaign proposal to call “for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on” became one of the focal points of his campaign.

His decision to follow through with the policy sparked protests nationwide. The Trump administration revised the policy multiple times before the Supreme Court upheld it in a 5-4 decision.

Morris did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment. A message left for Miller at the non-profit group he helps lead was also not returned.

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