By Tracy Wilkinson and Eli Stokols
Los Angeles Times
UNITED NATIONS — President Donald Trump unexpectedly used a high-level United Nations meeting on nonproliferation Wednesday to accuse China of seeking to meddle in the November midterm election in retaliation for the growing U.S. trade war with Beijing.
“China has been attempting to interfere in our upcoming 2018 election … against my administration.” said Trump, who was chairing his first Security Council meeting. “They do not want me or us to win because I am the first president ever to challenge China on trade.”
U.S. national security officials have previously warned that they are monitoring digital efforts by China and other countries to meddle in the upcoming election, but the president has not previously singled Beijing out for criticism on a charge that is politically problematic for the White House.
Trump has repeatedly dismissed or derided the conclusion of U.S. intelligence agencies that the Kremlin directed an extensive campaign of computer hacking and social media during the 2016 election to help Trump win. During a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in July, Trump suggested he believed Moscow’s denials more than the U.S. evidence, but he later backtracked on that.
Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has indicted more than 30 people, and obtained guilty pleas from four of Trump’s former senior aides, in his investigation of the Russian operation and whether the Trump campaign cooperated with it.
On Monday, Washington and Beijing hit each other with their biggest round of tariffs yet, escalating the growing conflict between the world’s two largest economies.
The Trump administration imposed new 10 percent tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese goods, spanning thousands of products including food seasonings, baseball gloves, network routers and industrial machinery parts. China retaliated immediately with new taxes on $60 billion of American goods, including meat, chemicals, clothes and auto parts.
In all, U.S. tariffs now apply to over $250 billion of Chinese goods, roughly half the amount it sells to the United States. China has fired back with tariffs on U.S. exports worth more than $110 billion.
Nonpartisan polls since midsummer have shown that nearly half of Americans say the tariffs are bad for the U.S. economy, meaning the issue may resonate in the November election.
During the Security Council session, Trump praised nuclear-armed North Korea, which has not taken any public actions to denuclearize, and attacked Iran, which dismantled or mothballed its nuclear infrastructure under an international accord that Trump has rejected.
He threatened European allies and others that have sought to preserve the accord by continuing to trade with Iran. The Trump administration re-imposed economic sanctions on Tehran in August that were suspended as part of the deal, and plans to add more sanctions in November in an effort to cut off its oil exports.
“Anyone who fails to comply will face severe consequences,” Trump warned.
He briefly criticized Russia for backing Syrian President Bashar Assad in the country’s civil war, but then shifted to other issues, taking credit for staving off humanitarian disaster in Idlib, the last rebel-held enclave in Syria, and complaining repeatedly about Iran’s support for terrorist groups and spreading “chaos” in the Middle East.
French President Emmanuel Macron was the first of several leaders who rose to challenge Trump in the Security Council session. He said U.S. strategy was misguided.
