Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), who is reportedly being considered by Donald Trump to be secretary of state, on Monday morning said that the President-elect’s unprecedented phone call with the president of Taiwan was “terrific.”
“It will demonstrate that by not just paying attention to the norms — and he didn’t violate any treaties by doing that — but by doing that, by picking up that phone and for the first time having a conversation with the president, elected president, of Taiwan, he showed the dictators in Beijing that he’s not a pushover,” he said on “Fox and Friends.”
“These people, you’ve got to remember, China has had an enormously aggressive foreign policy and by him actually going to Taiwan, he’s showing the people in Beijing that they cannot have this aggressive foreign policy and expect to be treated just the same by an American president,” Rohrabacher continued. “So I think it was a terrific message to them: We’re no longer going to be pushovers, and there’s going to be consequences for their hostile and aggressive actions.”
The congressman also said that he agrees with Trump that the United States should be “trying to establish a positive relationship with Russia in order to defeat radical Islam.”
Trump spoke with the president of Taiwan last week, the first U.S. leader to do so in decades. The call prompted China to issue a warning to Trump. The President-elect’s team spent weeks setting up the call in a deliberate move to change the country’s approach to Taiwan, according to a Washington Post report.
