Trump Backed China’s Concentration Camps For Muslims, Saying They’re ‘Exactly The Right Thing To Do,’ Bolton Claims

Donald Trump told the Chinese president Xi Jinping that building concentration camps to “re-educate” Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang was the right thing to do, according to bombshell claims in a new book by John Bolton, the former US national security adviser.

Trump approved of the concentration camps during a private meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, according to former national security adviser John Bolton’s upcoming memoir, “In The Room Where It Happened.”

In the private meeting during the 2019 G-20 meeting in Japan, Trump and Xi were only accompanied by their interpreters, according to Bolton’s upcoming memoir, “In The Room Where It Happened,” parts of which were published in The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.

Xi “explained to Trump why he was basically building concentration camps in Xinjiang,” Bolton claimed, based on the interpreter’s account.

The interpreter reportedly added that “Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do.”

Bolton also recalled in the book that Matthew Pottinger, a retired US Marine and a current deputy national security adviser, “told me that Trump said something very similar during his November 2017 trip to China.”

“The Chinese Communist Party has long been criticized for its construction of large concentration camps in Xinjiang, where millions of ethnic minority Uighur Muslims are believed to be detained under the guise of a counter-terrorism campaign,” reports Business Insider. “Inside the roughly 465 camps in Xinjiang and surrounding region, roughly 2-3 million Uighur Muslims are under surveillance and are subject to mandatory ‘reeducation’ training. Some survivors have reported being beaten, subjected to medical experiments, and even being forced to watch gang rapes.”

“The concentration camps have been criticized by the White House, and lawmakers from both parties have condemned the practice. Trump walked back his reluctance to take action against China for its treatment of the Uighur Muslims and signed a bipartisan bill on Wednesday. The Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act was overwhelmingly approved by both chambers and would sanction officials involved with the camps.”

“Beijing’s barbarous actions targeting the Uyghur people are an outrage to the collective conscious of the world,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in late May. “This House of Representatives, in a very strong bipartisan way, we are sending a message to the persecuted that they are not forgotten. We’re saying to the president of China: you may tell these people that they are forgotten, but they aren’t,” BI noted.

China has repeatedly denied that the Uighur Muslims have been mistreated and claims that the notion “blatantly smears China’s counterterrorism and deradicalization measures and seriously interferes in China’s internal affairs.”

“We urge the US to immediately rectify its mistake, stop using Xinjiang-related issues to intervene in China’s internal affairs and refrain from going even further down the wrong path,” the Chinese embassy in Washington, DC, reportedly said in a statement.