President Donald Trump angered many in his MAGA base this week by making the case to Fox News’s Sean Hannity for allowing 500,000 Chinese students in the collegiate system. Trump also argued for allowing China to own farmland in the United States, something he had long railed against.

“I would assume I’m in Beijing if I wanted to buy property near one of their military installations. I don’t think President Xi–” Hannity pressed at one point, noting China would not allow the U.S. to own farmland next to its sensitive national security sites.

“No, they wouldn’t let you. Look, it’s not that I love it. You want to see farm prices drop. You want to see farmers lose a lot of money, just take that out of the market. But they’ve had a lot of land for a long time. Obama did nothing about it. They bought a lot during the Obama administration, and he did nothing about it,” Trump replied, adding:

As far as the students, it’s 500,000 students they come—good students. I could tell them, “I don’t want any students,” is a very insulting thing to say to a country. They would then immediately go out and start building universities all over China. But if you don’t have those students—good students, by the way—if you don’t, and we do another thing, you know, if they’re good and they want to stay in America, we won’t give them a green card and things like that. You know, and that’s not only them, but other countries.

But if you want to see a university system die, take a half a million people out of it. And, you know, the ones that won’t be heard are the top schools. The top schools will do fine, but your lower schools, your lower—the ones that don’t do quite as well—those two, they’ll be dying all over the place. I frankly think that it’s good that people come from other countries and they learn our culture, and many of them want to stay here. I think it’s a good thing. Not everybody agrees with me, and it doesn’t sound like a very conservative position.

And I’m as conservative—I’m a conservative guy. I’m really a common sense guy, I think, more than a conservative. I think MAGA is common sense. You know, people understand we want strong borders. We want a strong military. We want good education. We want low interest rates. Well, you know, we want—but, but—

“People would argue they worry about whether they have nefarious intentions,” pushed back Hannity.

“Sure, I know, and we worry about that, and honestly, you know, they do things to us, and we do things to them. It’s a very fine line, the whole thing with students. So they have 500,000 students. Our university system does great, you know, it does great. You want to screw it up, take a half a million students, and you’re gonna see bankruptcies at the lower end of good colleges—but they’re not known or whatever,” Trump continued, adding:

You’re gonna have a lot of problems. So it’s something I’m always looking at, but it’s a very insulting thing to tell a country, “We don’t want your people in our schools.” I mean, it really is. Now I’ll have people say, “Oh, that’s a terrible thing, you know.” It is a very insulting thing, and it’s very interesting. It’s something didn’t come up today, came up last time, came up this time, but I will tell you that school systems don’t want that to happen because you won’t have much of a school system.

Longtime MAGA influencer Mike Cernovich shared the clip on X and asked, “Has China defeated our country?”

Idaho state Rep. Heather Scott (R) also shared the interview and added, “China won’t be purchasing farmland in Idaho. We have state laws that prevent this.”

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