She may very well even understand it because she’s not exactly dumb, but she is a creature of Washington, arguably one of the Apex predators, like some siren or hydra, maybe a mashup of them.

Because of the position of the party that plays the role of the tolerant, accepting, and anti-racists; she can’t just come out and say what underlies her words, “we, the ruling class parasites are getting very scared of China deposing our stranglehold on the world, and we don’t like that; so we will raise manipulative ‘concerns’ in an effort to bring about outcomes that hopefully will benefit us.”