What was Kamala Harris talking about when she accused Donald Trump of selling chips to China?

Two days on and there’s still so much to unpack from the 90-minute mud-slinging contest that was the Harris/Trump presidential debate. Accusations were made on both sides, some false (mostly from Trump), some true, but what are we to make of Kamala Harris’s claim that Donald Trump sold chips to China?

Discussing the topic of sales tariffs on foreign imports from countries such as China, Trump defended his plan claiming that the cost would fall upon the countries importing the goods and not the average consumer. Trump confidently stated that “China was paying us hundreds of billions of dollars and so were other countries.” He also pointed out that many of the tariffs that he’d brought in were still in place under the Biden administration three and a half years later.

Responding to his tirade, Harris pointed out that the Trump administration resulted in a trade deficit and trade wars before accusing the former president of making a deal with China and selling American chips to the country “to help them improve and modernize their military.” In her words he “basically sold us out when a policy about China should be about making sure the United States of America wins the competition for the 21st century.” 

She went on to talk about how the U.S. should be investing in American-based technology “so that we win the race on A.I. and quantum computing.” Whereas Trump’s deal with China achieved the opposite of this.

Did Trump really sell chips to China?

In his response, Trump stated that “they bought their chips from Taiwan,” before claiming that the U.S. “hardly makes chips anymore because of philosophies like they [Democrats] have.” But that doesn’t change the fact that yes, at the start of his presidency, companies like Nvidia were selling semiconductor chips and GPUs to China according to an article from nature.com.

However, to be fair to Trump here, towards the end of his presidency he did start to bring in restrictions on the export of such technologies to Chinese companies like Huawei. However, An article from Time reports that there were loopholes and ways around this blacklist that still allowed for the sale of such technology. For example, U.S. companies learned that if less than 25% of the technology on a chip originated in the U.S. it could be classed as foreign and thus not covered by the ban. It wasn’t the best, but at least it was a start.

Either way, the Biden administration has since tightened restrictions on chip sales to China even more. On top of that, Biden also signed the CHIPS and Science Act which allocated $50 billion to increase the manufacturing of chips in the U.S., something which Kamala doesn’t get the chance to mention during the debate.

Anyways, to answer the question, yes, Trump did allow for the sale of chips to China. Although he did get the ball rolling with restricting sales, Biden was the one to come in and sweep up the mess and actually be the one to invest in American companies.