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Massachusetts Rep. Jake Auchincloss, a Democrat who sits on the U.S. House Select Committee on China, said that China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin are both hoping that former President Donald Trump will be reinstated to the White House in the 2024 election.
“Let me be crystal clear here: Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are salivating at the prospect of President Trump re-entering the White House in 2025,” Auchincloss said at Semafor’s World Economy Summit on Wednesday.
“January 6, 2021, was Xi Jinping’s best day in office because when the United States degrades its own democracy on the world stage for people all over to witness, it undermines the power of our example,” he said.
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Auchincloss and Trump’s former national security advisor, Robert C. O’Brien, who was speaking remotely at the summit, then had a tense exchange over Trump.
O’Brien said that he had heard from foreign leaders that Trump’s criminal indictment was “the darkest day for political prisoners around the world.”
He added that the U.S. is setting a bad precedent by prosecuting the de facto leader of the opposition.
Auchincloss then retorted that Trump had been “fanboying all over Vladimir Putin” during his presidency, adding, “Thank goodness we have Joe Biden in the White House when Vladimir Putin decided to invade Ukraine.”