Trump defends Chinese students in US colleges — and conservatives are confused

President Donald Trump surprised many of his own supporters during a recent interview with Sean Hannity when he defended the presence of Chinese students at American universities — arguing that removing them would devastate higher education in the United States.

“I could tell them I don’t want any students. It’s a very insulting thing to say to a country. They would then immediately go out and start building universities all over China,” Trump told Hannity.

“If you want to see a university system die, take a half a million people out of it,” he added.

BlazeTV host Pat Gray and executive producer Keith Malinak are among those supporters confused.

“We’re completely dependent on Chinese students,” Gray says in disbelief. “American universities would collapse without Chinese students. Come on.”

“What are you, Joe Biden? That’s something he would say. Or Barack Obama, not Donald Trump,” he adds.

“And so far,” executive producer Keith Malinak chimes in, “as the president is making his case, the two main points that he has offered to us is that it’s highly insulting and the schools might go bankrupt.”

“I’m not seeing the bigger picture here that the president is, clearly,” he adds.

“Clearly not true, for one thing,” Gray says.

“American universities will not collapse without 500,000 Chinese in them. That’s nonsense,” he continues. “This is a fairly new phenomenon to begin with. And secondly, 500,000 split between, what is it, 15,000 universities? How many do we have in the country? It’s not that many; you’re not going to lose that many students.”

Trump went on to claim that while the “top schools will do fine” without the influx of Chinese students, the “lower schools” would not be fine.

“I think it’s just the opposite of that,” Gray says. “It’s more like the Harvards and the Princetons that are going to do worse because how many Asian students are at those schools? They probably have the highest percentage.”

“They’re cutting back on their Asian students because they’ve got too many,” he adds.

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