President Donald Trump repeated his claim that Taiwan had stolen the U.S.’s semiconductor industry last weekend, suggesting that it was a U.S. leadership failure to allow its own production to decline.
“If we had smart presidents, the Taiwan problem with China wouldn’t exist. Nobody would care,” Trump said during a phone interview with Fox News. “They stole our chip business, all of it, 100%, because they made chips at a ridiculous price, and they just pushed them in.”
Trump has made similar statements about Taiwan stealing the U.S.’s semiconductor industry for two years. “Taiwan took our chip business from us, I mean, how stupid are we?” he said to Bloomberg in July 2024. Most recently he told a rally on October 13 that Taiwan “got lots of money because they stole our chip business.”
Taiwan initially pushed back strongly on these claims. In October 2024 Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) said he disagreed with Trump and that Taiwan developed its semiconductor industry on its own. “Is our chip business a thief? Did we steal the U.S.’s chip business? I’m telling you, no.”
More recently Taiwan seems to have adopted the strategy of responding as little as possible, while signing deals to appease the U.S. Trump’s latest comments come on the heels of Taiwan agreeing to invest in a large U.S. energy project, and against a much larger context of an administration project to bring Taiwanese semiconductor foundries to the U.S.
Trump announced on the campaign trail earlier this month that Taiwan had agreed to invest $4.4 billion in a natural gas project in Alaska and to purchase 30% of its production, claims that the Taiwanese government has broadly corroborated. The South Korean government pushed back when Trump made similar claims.
Trump convinced Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC to announce new foundries in Arizona at the end of his first term and to launch a massive expansion at the beginning of his second. His administration has been very clear that it wants to bring as much of TSMC’s production to the U.S. as possible.
“It’s all made in Taiwan, right? And that’s just too far away for America,” said Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick during the announcement of a new semiconductor plant in North Carolina last week.
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