As Donald Trump prepared to leave for his trip to China, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan appeared on Newsmax and offered predictable words of encouragement. “Thank goodness President Trump is our president doing these negotiations,” the Ohio Republican said.
Oddly enough, officials in Beijing were thinking along the same lines, although not for reasons the White House will like. The New York Times reported:
China increasingly casts itself not as a fading civilization trying to catch up to the West but as a superpower poised to surpass it. Chinese nationalists and state-linked commentators say they have Mr. Trump to thank. America under his rule, they say, validates Mr. Xi’s worldview centered on “the rise of the East and decline of the West.”
For decades, many Chinese viewed the United States with a mix of admiration, envy and resentment. America represented wealth, technological sophistication and institutional confidence. Even critics of Washington who reviled the American system often assumed that it worked. Mr. Trump’s ascent and his volatile second term shattered that image.
The Times highlighted a recent report from a Beijing think tank affiliated with Renmin University, which sardonically thanked the American president for having done so much to weaken his own country.
The report called Trump an “accelerator of American political decay,” with the U.S. sliding toward polarization, institutional dysfunction and even “Latin American-style instability.”
And consider the evidence: The Republican arrives in China not just as an erratic figure doing lasting harm to the United States’ global stature, but as a weakened leader at home. It is not lost on officials in Beijing that Trump is an unpopular president, struggling to deal with domestic economic tumult, a failed tariff agenda and an unnecessary war that hasn’t gone according to plan, and whose political party is likely to suffer significant losses in the fall.
It’s not exactly a position of strength.
Indeed, it’s been difficult not to notice just how much weakness Trump has displayed toward China in the run-up to his latest trip. Less than a month ago, for example, the Republican appeared on Fox Business, and when asked about a “major cyberattack” from China, the president shrugged with indifference. “It is what it is,” he said. “China is China.”
In the weeks that followed, confronted with evidence that China was assisting Iran in its war with the U.S., Trump couldn’t even bring himself to criticize Beijing in timid terms. “I’m not overly disappointed,” he told Fox News two weeks ago. Three days earlier, the president described Chinese support for Iran as just “one of those things.”
Is it any wonder why China is so glad to see Trump in office?
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