Behind the lavish welcome that China paid to President Trump during his trip to Beijing last week was a clear understanding of what makes this fragile ego tick. Surround him with enough pageantry, shower him with enough flattery, coax him with enough false prestige, Xi Jinping (習近平) was betting, and Trump might just ignore the reason he was there in the first place: to advocate on behalf of American interests.
That bet has now paid off in spades. Trump walked away with a new best friend and practically nothing of substance to offer the American people.
When asked by Fox News on Friday to name a specific success of his trip, Trump seemed to acknowledge as much. “I think the most important thing is relationship,” he said. “It’s all about relationship. I have a very good relationship with President Xi and with China. And it sounds like something that doesn’t mean anything, but it’s everything.”
Trump’s bromance with Xi has brought him no closer to opening the Strait of Hormuz, just days after telling reporters that he doesn’t care about ordinary Americans’ gas prices anyway.
It has yielded a commitment from China to buy at least 200 Boeing planes, a deal so spectacular that the company’s stock has fallen nearly 10% since the announcement.
And it has won the U.S. no new help on controlling fentanyl precursor chemicals that originate in China. Contrast that with Biden’s 2023 summit with Xi, when China announced new restrictions that appear to have saved thousands of American lives.
Trump sounded even weaker when describing his efforts to free Jimmy Lai. “I brought up Jimmy Lai,” Trump told Fox News. “I would say the response to that was not positive.”
Not exactly a rousing account from a man who claims to be a hard-nosed negotiator. Of course Xi’s response wasn’t positive. That’s why you have to press him on it. But Trump was too busy gushing about those beautiful Chinese children with their flowers and American flags.
On the issue of Taiwan, China made its intentions clear. “The Taiwan question is the most important issue in China-U.S. relations,” a Beijing spokesperson said on Thursday. “If it is handled properly, the bilateral relationship will enjoy overall stability. Otherwise, the two countries will have clashes and even conflicts, putting the entire relationship in great jeopardy.”
It was the sort of veiled threat that a strong American leader wouldn’t tolerate for a moment. Yet after the summit, Trump decided to parrot a string of Beijing-friendly talking points. Trump said that China doesn’t want a “takeover” of Taiwan. He mentioned how dangerous it would be for Taiwan to declare independence.
He said that he wasn’t looking to “travel 9,500 miles to fight a war.” (Tehran is more than 6,000 miles from Washington.) He claimed (falsely) that Taiwan’s current President Lai Ching-te (賴清德) wants to go independent. And Trump, the man who never chooses his words carefully, paused before referring to Taiwan as a “place” and not a country. “We’ll call it a place because nobody knows how to define it,” he said.
Then he claimed that the pending $14 billion U.S. arms package to Taiwan was a useful bargaining chip in his negotiations with Xi. Yet prior to Trump, U.S. arms sales to Taiwan weren’t even on the negotiating table. Putting them there is a foolish unilateral concession, not some shrewd piece of dealmaking.
It all came out sounding like Trump had learned more about Taiwan from Xi than from his own advisors. And it was reminiscent of his past meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin, when he chose the assurances of his new dictator buddy over the conclusions of his own intelligence analysts.
Once upon a time, Trump seemed ahead of the curve on China: a hawk in an era of doves, a protectionist in an era of globalists. Now he just sounds pathetic.
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