President Donald Trump (l) shakes hand with China’s President Xi Jinping at the end of a press conference at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Nov. 9, 2017. Donald Trump and Xi Jinping put their professed friendship to the test on Nov. 9 as the least popular U.S. president in decades and the newly empowered Chinese leader met for tough talks on trade and North Korea. (Fred Dufour/AFP/Getty Images)

China rebuilt itself with the “tremendous amount” of money pouring out of the United States, President Donald Trump claimed, Sept. 19, asserting that America has been “ripped off” by “everyone,” including Beijing, writes Lalit K. Jha.

Trump said China has been taking out $500 billion a year from the U.S.

“They (Chinese) rebuilt their country with tremendous amounts of money pouring out of the United States. I’ve changed that around. If you look at what’s going on, our market is going up like a rocket ship. I don’t want their market to go down, but their market is down 32 percent in three months. Because we can’t let them do anymore what they’ve done,” he said.

Trump was addressing a joint news conference with the visiting Polish President Andrzej Duda at the White House.

“Over the last number of years, China has taken out of this country $500 billion and more a year. That would go a long way for Poland, wouldn’t it? You could rebuild your whole country. And that’s what China did,” he said.

Trump said he keeps a close watch on trade deficits as it was “very important.”

“When a country has $375 billion in trade deficits, and then many billions of dollars in other liabilities of all different types, one has to do something about it,” said President Trump.

Trump said the U.S. has become a “piggy bank” to the world “ripped off by everyone.”

“We have been ripped off by China. We’ve been ripped off by the European Union. We’ve been ripped off by everybody. I want to protect the American worker, the American farmer, the ranchers, the companies. We’re not being ripped off in a little while,” he said.

Responding to a question on his announcement of trade tariffs against China, Trump said, “It got to a point where the numbers were too big. This should have been done for the last 20 years. If you look at the World Trade Organization, that’s when China really happened, economically. It was like a rocket ship, because they took advantage of the rules of the WTO,” he asserted.