President Donald Trump criticized the nation of France on Monday in a back-and-forth with a Fox News host as he defended the enrollment of Chinese students at universities in the United States.
“I actually think it’s good to have outside countries,” the president said when asked about enrolling Chinese nationals at American universities.
“They’re not the French. They’re the Chinese. They spy on us. They steal our intellectual property,” Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham responded.
“Do you think the French are better?” the president retorted.
“Yeah,” Ingraham said.
“I’m not so sure,” the president responded.
There has been some tension between Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron throughout Trump’s second term. Some of it has centered over Russia’s war in Ukraine, as well as the Israel-Hamas war.
Macron was the first Western member of the United Nations Security Council and first G7 nation to announce that his country would recognize a Palestinian state.
Trump met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the end of last month while the president was traveling through South Korea. The US president said that the two leaders came to an agreement on “almost everything.”
Earlier this year, the Trump administration said it was going to “aggressively revoke” Chinese student visas before ultimately reversing course on that move.
According to the Institute of International Education, China has consistently been one of the main sources of international students to the US – approximately 1 in 4 international students in the United States are from China.
For decades, American universities have attracted some of China’s brightest minds. Seen as a path to a prestigious education and better career opportunities, US colleges have drawn Chinese students from middle-class families as well as the political and business elite.
China was the top source of international students in the US for 15 straight years until it was surpassed by India just last year, according to figures from Open Doors, a State Department-backed database tracking international student enrollment.
After decades of growth, the number of Chinese students in the US reached a peak of over 372,000 in the 2019-2020 school year, before declining to more than 270,000 in the 2023-2024 year – a drop that coincides with the Covid-19 pandemic but also increasing friction between the two governments.
CNN’s Jennifer Hansler, Piper Hudspeth Blackburn, Nectar Gan and Yong Xiong contributed to this report.
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