Donald Trump has suddenly announced a complete one-eighty on his campaign pledge to American farmers that he’d stop Chinese nationals buying up land in the U.S.
Fox News host Sean Hannity pressed him on why he had abandoned his promise to intervene on Thursday during his trip to China.
“It’s not that I love it,” Trump said, as he conceded that his promise has been withdrawn.
Hannity said “thousands and thousands of acres of farmland, ranchland, and land near military installations” are being purchased by Chinese buyers.
Farm-dependent counties in the U.S. voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2024; 78 percent of them backed Trump, which was up even from the strong support for his first term.
In Beijing, Trump was suddenly arguing that it would hurt farmers if he went ahead with his pledge. He said pulling out the external investment would force down land prices.
“You want to see farm prices drop, you wanna see farmers lose a lot of money? Just take that out of the market,” the president said.
On the campaign trail in September 2024, Trump was pledging the opposite. “We’re gonna protect it by saying you can’t come,” he said back then, in response to a reporter’s queries about Chinese-owned land at an event in Pennsylvania.
He added: “You can’t do it, we don’t want you buying our land, we don’t want you taking the land, and basically taking it off the market. We don’t want you doing it, and they’re buying it at levels nobody has seen before, we don’t want you buying it, that’s a very easy thing to do, but it’s causing a lot of disruption, and that’s what they want to do, so we could do that very easily.”
The actual scale of the problem is up for debate. Latest data from the Farm Service Agency, a subdivision of the Department of Agriculture, puts Chinese ownership at 0.52 percent of foreign-held acres in the U.S. That’s roughly 0.02 percent of total agricultural land across the country.
Those figures haven’t prevented the Trump administration from turning the China land question into a political flashpoint during his second term.
The president threw his weight behind a “National Farm Security Action Plan,” rolled out in July 2025, that aimed to ban new Chinese farmland purchases and force existing owners to divest within a year, or face fines and prison terms of up to five years. His comments to Fox have now thrown that initiative into question.
Trump obviously blaming the Democratic Party for the perceived threat of Chinese land ownership in the U.S.
“They’ve had a lot of land for a lot of time,” he told Hannity Thursday. “Obama did nothing about it. They bought a lot of it during the Obama administration. He did nothing about it.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment on this story.
