Donald Trump landed in Beijing yesterday aboard Air Force One with a billionaire’s retinue that read like a Forbes 400 family reunion, and the man he came to see didn’t even bother to walk out to the tarmac to greet him. (In 2009, when Obama visited, Xi personally met his plane.)
Xi Jinping sent his Vice President, Han Zheng, and the message couldn’t have been more of a slap in America’s face: this clownish, incompetent, criminal, unfaithful, backed-into-an-Iran-corner-of-his-own-making President of the United States, on his first state visit to China in nearly nine years, isn’t worth the dictator’s interrupting his morning tea.
There were three hundred children in matching blue-and-white waving flags, a military honor guard, and a red carpet, and there was Eric Trump, traveling in what the Trump Organization openly described as a “personal capacity,” which is the family lawyer’s polite way of saying he’s there to figure out a way to hustle some money out of his father’s position. Lara was beside him.
And yet, as Lisa Needham at Daily Kos writes in response to Eric‘s denial that he is going on the trip to make money:
“That might be more persuasive if Eric didn’t already have a partnership with a shady Chinese crypto company. Eric’s very own grifty crypto scheme, American Bitcoin Corp.—wow, such branding—has a partnership with Chinese bitcoin mining rig manufacturer Bitmain.
“Bitmain had been under a national security investigation here for months, in part over concerns that Bitmain computers could be controlled remotely from China.”
Elon Musk, Tim Cook, and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang came along too, along with a few less-well-known billionaires and CEOs, because when the President of the United States flies to Beijing to negotiate with the world’s most powerful authoritarian, predatory billionaires don’t want to miss a chance to lock in a side deal.
Not a single China expert or democracy advocate was on the plane, though, which should shock Americans to our core. The New York Times editorial board wrote yesterday:
“As is so often the case, though, Mr. Trump showed little strategic discipline, and he prioritized his own personal and political interests over the nation’s.”
Even more shocking, consider what Trump said just before boarding the plane. On Monday, standing outside the White House, he told reporters that he intends to discuss American arms sales to Taiwan with Xi during the summit.
“President Xi would like us not to,” he seemed to brag, apparently not realizing that Xi would love to have exactly that conversation, “and I’ll have that discussion. That’s one of the many things I’ll be talking about.”
That single sentence, casually delivered between waves to the cameras, flatly violates the Second of the Six Assurances that Ronald Reagan’s administration issued to Taiwan in 1982, which pledged in writing that Washington would never consult Beijing on arms sales to the island.
It’s as if, in the middle of World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt had said he was meeting with Hitler to decide the fate of the rest of Europe. And was more than happy to discuss it rather than simply being stalwart in defending that continent.
Reagan — who would have been shocked to his core by Trump‘s behavior — understood, as every Cold War president understood, that you don’t negotiate away a democracy’s right to defend itself in private chats with the autocrat who wants to swallow it. But low-IQ Trump, who has never read a State Department cable in his life as far as anyone can tell, just announced he’ll do exactly that.
And Chinese President Xi made the most of Trump’s waffling, threatening America this morning with war if we were to defend Taiwan, saying:
“If handled poorly, the two countries will collide or even clash, putting the entire U.S.-China relationship in an extremely dangerous situation.”
Trump’s response? Crickets.
Instead, as Robert Reich points out this morning, Trump and the oligarchs with him are hustling ways to transfer more American jobs and technology to China. It’ll screw American workers and damage our economy long-term, but it’ll sure make the CEOs, particularly Musk, Cook, and Huang, richer.
This is what an American oligarchic kleptocracy, an emerging tinpot dictatorship, looks like when it metastasizes from domestic disease into foreign policy.
Lawrence Lessig, in a remarkable piece this week titled “On the many layers of our corruption,” describes the Trump administration as the first in American history that can fairly be called a kleptocracy, distinct from every prior scandal-stained presidency because in this one the president and his family are personally pocketing the proceeds.
No American president in the past, and no president of any developed democracy throughout history, has ever even considered committing such a crime of self-enrichment at the nation’s expense in public. It’s typically done by men like Saddam Hussein, Vladimir Putin, Nicolae Ceaușescu, Joseph Stalin, and Adolf Hitler.
Lessig’s frame is essential reading, though he treats kleptocracy mostly as a domestic story. What’s happening in Beijing this week, however, is the same disease now presenting itself in its foreign policy phase.
When a corrupt president’s personal balance sheet — and that of his billionaire oligarch supporters — becomes American grand strategy, the world’s dictators figure it out fast, and Xi Jinping has figured it out completely. It’s not, after all, like it’s a secret that Trump and his family have been enthusiastically taking bribes and illegal emoluments since day one.
The traditional American posture toward communist dictatorships, from Truman drawing the line in Korea and Kennedy standing in West Berlin to say “Ich bin ein Berliner,” running through Reagan demanding Gorbachev tear down the Berlin Wall and George H.W. Bush imposing sanctions after Tiananmen, was explicit: push democracy outward, fund dissidents, broadcast Radio Free Europe and VOA behind the Iron Curtain, and insist that human rights belonged on every diplomatic agenda.
Whatever you thought of any individual president’s execution, the basic American posture for eighty years was that we stood for something larger than ourselves, for the democratic ideals that our Founders fought and died for, and that so many Americans have died to preserve, both here and around the world.
Trump’s posture, on the other hand and for the first time in US history, is that he stands for himself and his rich friends, and the rest of us are along for the ride if it suits his family’s quarterly earnings. He’s ignoring Tiananmen, calling American dissidents “domestic terrorists,” has gutted the Voice of America, killed off USAID while handing developing countries to China, and ridicules the idea of human rights and international law.
We’ve already seen a preview of what happens when the world considers business more important than freedom. In 2020, Xi crushed Hong Kong’s democracy movement in a matter of months, jailed the protesters, shuttered the free press, and put publisher Jimmy Lai into a prison cell where he still sits to this day. The response from Washington and Europe amounted to a sternly worded statement and a polite cough.
Twenty-five years of the “one country, two systems” promise, though, was instantly and brutally erased while America and the West shrugged. Xi watched that, learned from it, and now sees in Trump a man who — for the right gift and the right corporate side deals for his circle of billionaires — might give him cover to do the same thing to Taiwan.
But the stakes are infinitely greater now, because Taiwan is not Hong Kong. The stakes are now nuclear.
Taiwan is a thriving democracy of twenty-three million people that manufactures most of the semiconductors that run the entire global economy, and a Chinese takeover would reorder the world in ways that can’t be undone for generations. And Taiwan has a powerful military, backed in theory by the United States.
The Taiwanese must be very concerned today. This ego- and greed-driven pattern of how Trump operates in ways that regularly screw America and working people but makes Trump and his family richer isn’t a matter of speculation anymore.
Back in April 2024, in a dining room at Mar-a-Lago, he told a roundtable of fossil fuel executives that if they raised a billion dollars for his campaign, it would be a bargain for them given everything he’d dismantle. He’s now followed through, taking a sledgehammer to wind, solar, and the EV transition while opening federal lands and waters to drillers. He even paid a European company a full billion dollars just to stop construction of a wind farm off the American East Coast.
That’s Trump’s kleptocratic operating system, on the record, in his own words. The fossil fuel executives got what they paid for, Trump got the presidency and immunity from prison that he wanted, and the country got screwed in a way that’s now vividly on display as a result of the energy shortages caused by his Iran war.
The version of Trump’s grift playing out in Beijing this week will essentially be the same transaction, just with bigger stakes and a different counterparty that could even provoke World War III.
Meanwhile, here at home, Trump told reporters on Tuesday with cameras rolling, that when it comes to working Americans crushed by gas prices at $4.51 a gallon and inflation surging to a three-year high, he doesn’t think about their financial situation “not even a little bit.”
“I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody,” he said.
And the reality is that, as a term-limited president, he doesn’t have to; now he’s only answering to his own money bin. NPR’s Planet Money, the New Yorker, and the Wall Street Journal have all separately calculated that the Trump family has made roughly $4 billion off the presidency since his second term began a little over a year ago.
Most of that came through crypto (with a half-billion dollars from the UAE), Persian Gulf real estate, and licensing deals with foreign dictators who’ve figured out that the path to modifying American domestic and foreign policy in ways that benefit them now runs through the Trump family’s wallet.
You can trace the through-line all the way back to a moment of glorious projection. In 2020, as Donald Trump Jr. was watching his father lose to Joe Biden, he told GQ Magazine that “if my name was Hunter Biden, I could make millions off my father’s presidency.”
Five years later, with his father back in the Oval Office and a cabinet of thirteen billionaires around him, Don Jr. is on a perpetual world tour through Vegas crypto conferences and Qatari investment summits, his net worth is now somewhere north of half a billion dollars by Forbes’s count, and his younger brother Eric is in Beijing this week trading on the family name in what the family lawyer laughingly insists is a purely personal capacity.
The Trumps are doing what they once accused Hunter Biden of doing, but at a scale that even the most generous reader of Hunter’s overseas board membership couldn’t begin to compare with.
My wife Louise and I were talking the other night about how strange it feels to live through a moment when the things that used to be considered obvious bipartisan principles, like “don’t sell out a democratic ally to a communist dictator” and “don’t run the foreign policy of the United States to benefit your family business,” simply aren’t operative anymore.
This has literally never happened in the entirety of American history, or the history of most any other successful democracy in the world. But it’s exactly what happened in Russia, and is happening today in America.
The Republican politicians who once cheered Reagan for refusing to negotiate Taiwan’s defense with Beijing now fearfully but silently watch as their president flies to Beijing to negotiate exactly that.
The checks that the Framers gave to Congress have been crushed by party loyalty and the fear of a strongman’s retribution, and the checks the framers gave We the People (the vote) has been weakened by gerrymandering, a flood of dark money in politics, new restrictions and regulations on the right to vote, and the steady erosion of any sort of a shared factual reality by media captured by billionaires.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that we still have tools and they still work if we use them.
Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi has introduced the Six Assurances to Taiwan Act (H.R. 3452 in the House and S. 3208 in the Senate), which would codify Reagan’s Six Assurances into binding federal law so that no president, this one or any future one, can quietly trade Taiwan’s defense away for a flattering banquet and a few corporate deals.
That bill is sitting in committee waiting for public pressure to move it.
Call the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell your senators and your representative you want them on it. Make sure your voter registration is current at vote.org, find your state legislators at openstates.org, and if you want to support the deeper legal fight against the super PAC and big-money corruption that made all of this possible, Lawrence Lessig’s Equal Citizens is a great place to start.
Talk with your neighbors. Talk to your family. The corruption metastasizing across Beijing this week is the same corruption strangling Washington, and the only thing that’s ever stopped it in American history is an organized, awake, and angry public.
If this article is useful to you, please share it widely with everyone you know, and consider supporting The Hartmann Report with a paid subscription so we can keep doing this work every day. Democracy doesn’t defend itself. That’s our job, dangerous as it often is these days, and it starts with the next phone call you make.
Louise’s Daily Song: “Red Carpet Blues”
Comments on Wednesday’s Daily Take:
The Billionaire Plot to Put Women Back in Chains
Stories like this are becoming alarmingly common as they also become increasingly unbelievable. If this paper had been published ten years ago it would have been dismissed as raving from the lunatic fringe. But now we’re one election away from Project 2025 replacing the Constitution and Bill of Rights as the country’s governing document. The parallels with 1930s Germany are chilling.
~ Mobiguy
The hand that rocks the cradle could belong to anyone.....
These cavemen and some cave women do not know how to read the room. Gender is not going to define people of the future.
It is a damn good thing that it will not, because humanity will need every great brain and good heart to solve our problems regardless of the body it is in.
~ alis
My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.
The morbidly rich have no boundaries, geographical or moral, when it comes to exploiting workers to enrich themselves.
Taiwan does not need US weapons as much as they need a production deal with Ukraine. Ukraine should sell Taiwan production licenses to its drone technology. Taiwan could then produce drones for Ukraine and themselves. Taiwan especially needs submarine drones to break any future blockade of the island. The US should not build more battleships or nuclear carriers but small robot ships and drone launchers. What the US needs most from Taiwan is chip production facilities built in the US. Need to remove this major vulnerability that China could take out or hold hostage the world because everyone is dependent on Taiwan producing the most advanced computer chips. The US has to become a backup supplier of these chips. The US needs to help Taiwan so it can fight as well as Ukraine without needing direct US military intervention.