Republican senators spent the week publicly criticizing Donald Trump for the lavish welcome he gave Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington, a summit that featured a red carpet on the tarmac, a state dinner packed with billionaires, and a White House video of the American president mocking Joe Biden to make a communist dictator laugh. The backlash from his own party landed just weeks after intelligence tied Xi’s government to attacks on American troops.
The spectacle would be embarrassing on its own. It’s indefensible coming from a president who has spent the run up to the November midterms branding his domestic opponents as communists while fawning over the genuine article.
The moment that defined the summit came Thursday, when Trump walked Xi down the West Colonnade past his Presidential Walk of Fame, the gallery of gilded portraits he installed last year. In video the White House posted itself, Trump stops at the autopen image hanging in Biden’s place and delivers the punchline, telling Xi, “Trump, and then Trump, and this is the autopen.” Newsweek reported the joke drew laughter from Xi and his entire entourage. A US president degraded his predecessor as entertainment for the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, and the White House was proud enough of it to post the footage.
A Red Carpet, A State Dinner, And Two Pandas
Trump personally greeted Xi at Joint Base Andrews on Wednesday, an honor no US president had extended to a visiting world leader since 1962 outside of the pope. The next evening brought a state dinner whose guest list included Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, and Jensen Huang, a room full of self styled free market champions in black tie for a communist party boss.
Xi came bearing gifts, announcing two pandas bound for Zoo Atlanta and a pledge to host 100,000 young Americans in exchange programs. That was apparently the going rate for America’s dignity. Even Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker refused to play along, taking to the Senate floor before the summit to call Xi an “oppressive dictator” and to say he would have advised against the lavish welcome entirely, remarks The Washington Post spotlighted as a rare Republican rebuke.
China Helped Iran Target American Troops
The Hill reported that Republican senators emerged dismayed from a classified briefing Thursday detailing deepening military cooperation between China and Iran, which came after revelations this month that Iran used Chinese satellite imagery to target US troops stationed in Jordan.
Sit with that sequence. Xi’s government helped point weapons at American service members, and within weeks Trump handed the man a red carpet, a dinner menu, and a giggling tour of the people’s house.
Communists Everywhere Except The White House Driveway
The Associated Press captured the absurdity at the heart of this week. Trump branded Democrats communists over and over at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, warning that America becomes a communist country if they win, and he has repeatedly declared communism the greatest threat this nation has ever faced. The word is a slur he throws at Americans he doesn’t like. It evaporates the moment an actual communist lands at Andrews.
The cynicism runs deeper. Trump delivered a primetime address this summer accusing China of sinister election meddling in 2020, then shrugged days later that “China is maybe a little bit different today than it was then.” He rigged up an entire national security grievance, aired it to the country, and dropped it the moment it complicated his party planning.
He also made no secret of the point of his South Lawn construction project, saying openly that the new granite helipad was meant to impress Xi and lamenting that his ballroom wouldn’t be finished in time. The AP noted that even some Republicans now describe his government stakes in private companies as corporate socialism. The communism panic was never a principle. It was a campaign prop.
A Senator’s Best Defense Was Panda Express
Utah’s Mike Lee managed to make the week more embarrassing. Asked on Fox Business whether Trump was being too nice to Xi, Lee praised the president as a consummate host and suggested taking Xi to Panda Express, saying he wouldn’t be surprised if Trump told him, “let’s go visit Panda Express and see what you think of their broccoli beef.”
A sitting United States senator went on national television and fantasized about taking the president of China to a mall food court chain because the man is Chinese. Critics piled on within hours, many calling the suggestion flatly racist, and it earned the rare distinction of being racist and stupid at the same time. That was the intellectual firepower deployed in the summit’s defense.
Now He Wants Potash From Another Strongman
Xi isn’t the only dictator getting the Trump treatment this month. Three days before the summit, Trump announced on Truth Social that the United States is working on a massive deal to buy potash fertilizer from Belarus, calling it “very good news for our Farmers and Ranchers.” Canada shipped about 90% of US potash imports last year, CNN noted, but Trump lit that relationship on fire with his trade war, so he went shopping in Minsk instead.
Belarus is ruled by Alexander Lukashenko, widely known as Europe’s last dictator, a Putin ally whose regime holds hundreds of political prisoners, journalists and activists among them. The Trump administration already lifted sanctions on Belarusian potash producers this year in exchange for prisoner releases, spending American leverage against a dictatorship on fertilizer. And for anyone still keeping score on the communism panic, Belarus maintains its own registered Communist Party, led by Sergei Syrankov, whose entire function is cheering Lukashenko on.
The pathetic coda is that Lukashenko undercut the whole announcement within hours, saying Belarus has no spare volumes to sell because this year’s supply is already contracted. Trump got publicly stood up by Europe’s last dictator and called it a deal. Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe said in a statement reported by UPI that buying from Belarus directly supports Russia and its war in Ukraine, adding, “It’s wrong and it doesn’t make sense.”
Kim Jong Un Is Already Penciled In
There’s a third dictator on the schedule. Standing on his new helipad in August, Trump confirmed to reporters that he plans to meet Kim Jong Un before the year is out, answering “Yeah, I will be” when NBC News pressed him on it. He bragged to the assembled press, in remarks carried by CNN, that “The fact that I get along with him, that’s a good thing,” and casually credited North Korea with 57 very powerful nuclear weapons, rattling off the arsenal of a nuclear armed tyrant like a fun fact. Pyongyang’s answer, delivered through Kim Yo Jong and analyzed by Reuters, amounted to not so fast.
So the five week tally reads like this. Trump embraced the head of the Chinese Communist Party, courted a dictatorship propped up by its own communist party, and penciled in a reunion with the third generation despot of North Korea, all while telling American voters that the real communists live next door.
He Has Spent A Decade Praising Men Like This
None of this is a lapse. It’s the pattern of his entire public life. In September 2016, Trump praised Vladimir Putin as “really very much of a leader,” and more of a leader than the sitting American president, at a moment when Putin’s critics were being jailed, poisoned, and disappeared. That courtship never ended, and Trump invited Putin to Trump National Doral in Miami just this week.
That same 2016 campaign produced his tribute to Saddam Hussein, whom he applauded for killing terrorists without due process, gushing, “He did that so good. They didn’t read them the rights.” He declared Libya would be better off with Gaddafi in charge, and he defended retweeting Benito Mussolini, the founder of fascism, on the grounds that it was “a very good quote.”
The presidency only widened the field. In April 2017 he told Egypt’s coup leader Abdel Fattah el-Sisi he had done “a fantastic job in a very difficult situation,” and he personally called Rodrigo Duterte to congratulate him on an “unbelievable job on the drug problem,” a drug war built on thousands of extrajudicial killings. By September 2017, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan was, in Trump’s telling, “getting very high marks,” fresh off purging the press and jailing his opponents.
The oldest receipt is the darkest. In 1990, Trump praised China’s Tiananmen Square massacre as a demonstration that “shows you the power of strength,” and on a 2016 debate stage he waved the slaughter off as a riot. Then in March 2018, after Xi cleared the way to rule China indefinitely, Trump told donors at Mar-a-Lago that Xi was president for life, that he thought it was great, and that maybe America would have to give that a shot some day, according to a recording obtained by CNN.
Everyone treated that line as a joke. Eight years later, Xi is still president for life, Trump is back in the White House refusing to discuss leaving it, and the two men spent Thursday laughing together at the American president who beat him. Trump has told the country for a decade exactly who he admires and what he wants. This week he hung the answer in gold frames on the White House wall.
