President Trump’s state dinner for Red China’s dictator was a masterpiece of peace through strength. He’s the strength.
Ahead of the fete, Laura Loomer panned the very idea of the visit, tweeting, “China stole the election from President Trump. So can someone please explain to me why China hasn’t been held accountable for this, and why their Communist dictator is being treated like a king on US soil today?
“As always, there is ZERO accountability. Always a win for our enemies.”
I cannot disagree with her about the election and covid, which she also mentioned, but accountability is the language of Democrats and RINOs—the very people who enabled the steal of our election and the shuttering of our economy.
But Trump does not have time for vengeance. He has a war with Red China to win and lo and behold, he has. He has shown Red China’s military equipment works about as well as communism does. Trump by force and by diplomacy has Red China by the chokepoints: Panama Canal, Strait of Malacca (Indonesian agreement), Strait of Gibraltar (Moroccan agreement) and of courser Greenland. The Danish politicians Xi bought are now as worthless to him as they are to everyone else.
The state dinner allowed Chairman Xi to save face. The communist press in his country churned out propaganda galore while the communist press in our country sucked its thumb and gazed at its navel muttering, but the judge said CNN can go wherever it wants in the White House. The press in our country said their job was so important to the country that the TV channels refused to air the speeches by Xi and Trump.
Real America’s Voice stepped in to fill the void.
What Trump bonded with Xi and politely showed him the American Eagle still rules the skies because the Chinese dragon went extinct thousands of years ago. To mix metaphors and paraphrase Mao, Red China is a paper tiger.
The bonding came after Xi and his bride rested after traveling halfway across the world. President Trump is so charming that Peggy Noonan turned down many opportunities to meet him for fear she would like the man. In 2024, she finally overcame her Orangephobia and attended a Wall Street Journal meeting with him.
She said, “So anyway, at a certain point, the doors fly open and the entourage comes in, and there’s Trump, who in person in that blue suit and the tie is huge, and the hair is huge, everything is huge. And he, like, blows by others, and he just says to me, ‘You are wonderful. You are the most remarkable woman.’
“And then he sat down with us. He went on and off the record. But off the record, he was hilarious, rude, inappropriate, said things about foreign leaders that should not be said to a bunch of journalists. And I just sat back and thought by the end, ‘Honey, your intuition was right. If you’d met him in 2015, you would have loved him and not seen him.’”
Trump is hard to hate, so celebrity swells put their heads in the sand.
Xi is not an ostrich. Trump won him over. The highlight was when the president took the commie on a tour of the White House. They stopped at the panel of portraits of presidents.
Trump showed his two portraits and the Auto Pen. They laughed. Someone said it was rare for Xi to laugh in public but he did because the two men knew what a joke Biden was.
Charles C. W. Cooke, senior editor at National Review, tweeted, “This is grotesque behavior. Joe Biden was an American president. Xi is a communist dictator, and the head of a foreign state. Our internal divisions are not fair game in this context.”
Well, we didn’t used to raid our political opponent’s home and authorize the FBI to use lethal force if necessary but here we are. The whole world knows our politics. All global politics hinges on the outcome of our midterm election.
I ask: Does Trump need Congress? This two-year term of Congress has done the least ever.
The president enjoyed humiliating Xi. David Perdue, the U.S. Ambassador to China, said on Fox News Sunday, “President Trump said, ‘Hey, we sell arms to other people around the world.’ He actually asked President Xi [if he] would he like to buy some at one point.”
Ouch.
For the record, Trump has denied saying this. Maybe he means he wouldn’t and made the offer in jest.
The liberal press missed his point completely. Rolling Stone reported, “It’s easy to pass this off as an off-handed Trump comment, the kind of thing he tosses off to a world leader without thinking it through. And the actual institutions in charge of prospective arms deals have been quick to deny that there is any kind of U.S.-China armed trade deal in the works. The White House and State Department both issued denials, with the latter noting that U.S. law would prohibit an arms sale to China.”
In an earlier century, publisher Jann Wenner’s wattles would quiver.
Trump was not so subtle in noting that the USA showed in Venezuela and Iran just how obsolete Red China’s cutting-edge military technology is.
But the real humiliation was a trip on Friday to the National Archive. The press reported Trump showed off the Constitution, Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence.
The humiliation came in the four other documents Trump wanted to show Xi: the Treaty of Wanghia (1844), the Treaty of Tientsin (1858), the Letter from the Guangxu Emperor to President Grover Cleveland (1895) and the Treaty of San Francisco (1951). The 19th century documents covered the sunset of imperial China as Britain and France rushed in. The USA followed right behind.
Red China’s delegation objected and that part of the tour was cut.
But the documents remain.
The Treaty of Wanghia was the first formal U.S.–China treaty, signed after Britain’s victory in the First Opium War. It gave the United States the same privileges Britain had just won at Nanjing. The treaty was the terms of surrender by the emperor.
U.S. trade with China with the first U.S. ship, The Empress of China, arriving in 1784.
(Around 1800, John Jacob Astor—the son of a German butcher who would later own much of Manhattan, setting his family up for riches for generations—set up Fort Astoria in Oregon, where trappers would load their furs on to ships that traded the furs and ginseng to the Chinese for tea, silk, cotton cloth and porcelain. Within a few years, he became a millionaire. Fort Astoria helped establish U.S. claims to the Oregon territory. Astor helped shape America but gets overlooked by most historians.)
The Treaty of Tientsin (1858) settled the Second Opium War. It expanded the Wanghia terms by opening more ports to the West, by allowing foreign diplomats to reside in Beijing, and by legalizing the opium trade and Christian missionary activity.
The seemingly innocuous letter to President Cleveland was really the emperor begging the U.S. to remain neutral in its war with Japan, which would lead to the independence of Korea and Taiwan—issues that still stick in the craw of the Chinese 131 years later.
What really galls the communist government is the final treaty.
The Treaty of San Francisco (1951) was signed by Japan and 48 allied countries. Japan renounced all right, title, and claim to Korea, Taiwan, various other islands and any claims in Antarctica. It does not say who receives Taiwan. That omission is deliberate. The Allies disagreed on whether the nationalists or the communists spoke for China.
I can see why the Chinese pushed back. I also can see why the president wanted to display those documents.
President Trump invited Tim Cook and a bevy of other tech CEOs to remind Xi of the USA’s lead in Artificial Intelligence. Musk was there to remind Xi of SpaceX’s lead in the space race.
Trump used the state dinner to bond with Xi but on Trump’s terms. America First means at best, Red China is second and likely far lower. For now, Xi is better off sniffing the tail and following Trump’s lead.
Trump understands something his critics keep missing: you can welcome a rival into your house and still drive a hard bargain. The dinner, the personal warmth, the showmanship all give him room to work. I admire that confidence. He can sit across from Xi, enjoy the conversation, and press for American workers to get the business. China’s coal commitments give that diplomacy a concrete purpose for mining communities. Don is right to applaud the approach. Trump makes American strength part of the conversation without spending the entire evening pounding the table. That takes nerve, preparation, and a feel for people. He has all three.
Peggy Noonan. She’s the reason I canceled my WSJ subscription years ago. There was not one piece that she wrote even about the weather that she did not say something derogatory about DJT. Just saying.