President-elect Donald Trump appointed former U.S. Sen. David Perdue as ambassador to China, putting a former Fortune 500 chief executive who has a long history of criticizing the nation into the key diplomatic post.
“He will be instrumental in implementing my strategy to maintain Peace in the region, and a productive working relationship with China’s leaders,” Trump said in a post Thursday night on his Truth Social platform.
Perdue will be charged with leading the nation’s diplomatic efforts in China at a tense time. Trump has threatened to impose a 10% tariff on Chinese goods unless the nation’s leaders curb the smuggling of fentanyl into the U.S.
In the Senate, Perdue was an ardent Trump loyalist. After his defeat to Democrat Jon Ossoff in a 2021 runoff, he waged a doomed primary challenge against Gov. Brian Kemp at Trump’s urging, and was defeated by more than 50 percentage points.
Perdue is the third Georgia Republican who ran for Senate in 2020 to earn a key position in Trump’s incoming administration. Trump tapped former U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler this week to run the Small Business Administration and earlier named former U.S. Rep. Doug Collins the head of the Veterans Affairs Department.
Before his career in politics, Perdue worked in Asia as a top executive with Sara Lee and Europe with shoemaker Reebok where he first earned the title chief executive. He later ran the Dollar General chain of family discount stores.
He won a crowded 2014 race for the open U.S. Senate seat held by Republican Saxby Chambliss and was one of the first Georgia GOP leaders to endorse Trump’s 2016 campaign.
He lost his 2020 reelection bid to Ossoff after a campaign that was marked by attacks that focused on China, as he and other Republicans tried to link Ossoff’s investigative journalism company to the Communist nation. Ossoff countered that Perdue had “demeaned himself” with the flimsy attack.
But Perdue also came under the microscope for his own connections to China. When he was chief executive of the Dollar General chain, he led the chain store’s aggressive expansion into China. And while working at Sara Lee, he used Hong Kong as a base to build an Asian operation from the “ground up.”
And during Perdue’s 2022 bid for governor, Kemp highlighted Perdue’s comments that he was “proud” of shifting manufacturing and jobs overseas in an ad that opened with footage of Trump promising to “bring jobs back from China.” It featured a split-second hashtag that dubbed Perdue “#BeijingDave.”
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