The Road to Reelection Runs Through Beijing
In numerous meetings, the President has…expressed his affection and admiration for China’s president Xi Jinping. The clear danger here is that our president may be “charmed into submission,” and this possibility likewise represents a signal failure of President Trump’s intelligence briefings.
—Memorandum to the President from Peter Navarro, October 25, 2017
I meet Jason Miller at the campaign headquarters and we go over some [internal] polling data. The data shows very clearly that about two-thirds of the respondents blame China for the pandemic [and] want reparations…. They like the idea of a Presidential Commission…and it appears to move voters off the fence [towards Trump]. This is a hot buttered croissant ready to eat.…
I tried fruitlessly to call Mark Meadows. What the heck is going on? The campaign headquarters is a ghost town. The White House is a ghost town. And I can’t reach anybody on the phone, including the Chief of Staff.
This is why we are going to lose. I can almost guarantee it right now, and I can taste the bitter fruit that is going to be served on November 3rd because we are not getting done what we should be getting done, and people are not working.
—Navarro Journal Entry, September 6, 2020, Labor Day Weekend
Of the Five Strategic Failures that would lead to the fall of the White House of Trump, the failure to make Communist China the most important issue of the 2020 campaign must rank head and shoulders above all others. Contributing mightily to this failure was the collateral and companion inability to credibly run on a Tough on China platform. It was all because of just too many Bad Personnel screwups and just piss-poor political judgment.
In fact, dating back to the nanosecond after President Trump was inaugurated in January of 2017, I believed that a Tough on China message—matched with Bannonite Action, Action, Action—should be the foundation of our 2020 campaign platform. After all, we had run hard on Communist China’s theft of American manufacturing jobs in 2016. Not coincidentally, the Democrat’s Blue Wall had crumbled under the weight of blue-collar factory workers rising up to dance with Donald J. Trump on Beijing’s mercantilist grave. Yet, in 2020, it was not to be.
A Beijing State of Mind
As I watched this strategic failure and train wreck of a China appeasement policy unfold, my state of mind was one of outrage. This was a controlled outrage yes, but an incandescent rage as well.
It was a rage directed not just at Communist China for its blatant and obvious bioweapons attack on America—obvious at least to me. My outrage was also directed at both the corporate media and the Democrat Party.
These two institutions, which are so critical to American democracy and the security of our nation, simply hated Donald Trump so much that they were willing to sweep under the rug any blame for a pandemic that should otherwise have been prudently and rationally assigned to Communist China.
Most of all, my rage was directed at my putative colleagues within the West Wing—Kudlow, Kushner, Meadows, Chris Liddell, Marc Short, Derek Lyons, always Mnuchin (who spent more time over in the West Wing than at his own Treasury Department), and even the vice president himself. It would be all of these politically tone-deaf mandarins who would fight me tooth and nail on my efforts to convince POTUS of the strategic imperative to run on a Tough on China platform.
This was a platform that necessarily had to be constructed with a set of policy planks as solid as Tennessee oak. These planks could, and should, have included everything from:
•A presidential commission to hold China accountable for the virus,
•A ban on Communist Chinese investment in American pension funds,
•Unyielding sanctions aimed at ending human rights abuses—including concentration camps in Xinjiang Province,
•A no-holds-barred response to China’s crushing of Hong Kong’s democracy, and
•The banning of all manner of Chinese social media companies like TikTok and WeChat.
Yes, I had a long list of Bannonite actions that would be as politically potent as morally and strategically necessary. And make no mistake about this: the American people and 2020 electorate were more than primed for such Action, Action, Action.
We’re All China Hawks Now
During the first three years of the Trump administration, as POTUS 45 became America’s first president to crack down on China’s unfair trade practices, the American people’s distrust of Beijing had only grown stronger. Consider that in a Pew poll during the last year of the Obama administration, 55 percent of the American people viewed China in an unfavorable light.1 Yet by the end of the Trump administration, that number had risen to 73 percent.2
Moreover, under President Trump’s leadership, nine of ten Americans would come to view Communist China as a threat while3 at least two-thirds of Americans also would see a wide range of issues with China as “serious concerns.” These issues included everything from Chinese cyberattacks and our massive trade deficit to environmental degradation, American job losses, and Communist China’s growing military might.4
History will no doubt judge this sea change in American attitudes towards Communist China during the Trump administration to be one of the president’s greatest achievements. As I was fond of saying during the last year of the administration when accused by the media and other critics of being a “hardliner” on China, my response was an homage to Richard Nixon and his famous quote: “We are all Keynesians now.”
My new Trump line in this old Nixon bottle was simply: “We are all China Hawks now.”
What Donald Trump had done to affect this China Hawk sea change was to rip the Band-Aid off a shop-worn bipartisan gospel of American economic engagement with a Communist enterprise that had wounded millions of American workers and all but killed America’s manufacturing and defense industrial base. According to this now thoroughly debunked globalist gospel, if America simply engaged economically with the big bad Communist Dragon, Xi Jinping’s brutal, authoritarian beast would somehow morph peacefully into a free and democratic system and society.
It was President Bill Clinton who would most famously preach this gospel of economic engagement to sell America and the American Congress on the single worst trade deal in US history. This was the shoehorning of Communist China into the World Trade Organization. Said Clinton in naively pimping for this trade policy disaster: “Economically, this agreement is the equivalent of a one-way street.”5
Bill Clinton was certainly right about that. He just got the direction wrong, as more than five million American manufacturing jobs would head offshore to the factories of Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou—even as over fifty thousand American factories would close.6
President Trump saw right through this gospel of economic engagement as nothing but free trade insanity.7 In the clear light of a Populist Economic Nationalist day, a strong majority of the American people now see Communist China for exactly what it is: a dangerous, predatory, mercantilist, and militarizing strategic rival intent on rising up across the globe by tearing America down.
And it is well worth noting here that it wasn’t just POTUS who brought about this sea change in American attitudes. It was fearless China Hawk warriors like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, White House Senior Counselor Steve Bannon, National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien, the Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan, and dare I say, yours truly.
It’s not for nothing that literally four minutes into the Biden administration, Communist China imposed sanctions8 on Pompeo, O’Brien, Bannon, and myself. Here is what the ministry of foreign affairs of the People’s Republic of China had to say about us:
Over the past few years, some anti-China politicians in the United States, out of their selfish political interests and prejudice and hatred against China and showing no regard for the interests of the Chinese and American people, have planned, promoted and executed a series of crazy moves which have gravely interfered in China’s internal affairs, undermined China’s interests, offended the Chinese people, and seriously disrupted China-U.S. relations…. China has decided to sanction…Michael R. Pompeo, Peter K. Navarro, Robert C. O’Brien…and Stephen K. Bannon. These individuals…are prohibited from entering the mainland, Hong Kong and Macao of China.9
Of course, the Skinny Ass Trade Deal China Appeaser trio of Mnuchin, Kudlow, and Kushner, along with Bob Lighthizer were noticeably absent from that list.
A Dead OMG Biden-Trump China Heat
Given President Trump’s leadership on the China issue, and given the dramatic shift in American attitudes, it was a no-brainer to make Communist China the number one issue of the 2020 campaign and to firmly position POTUS as the Tough on China candidate. This would, however, prove to be far more difficult than I would ever have imagined given the bona fides President Trump had established in the first three years of the administration with his bold tariffs and tough sanctions.
Our political problem was quite visible in the polling data after Joe Biden locked down his nomination as the Democrat Candidate to take on Trump. Throughout the spring and summer of 2020, polls began popping up showing that the American people saw little difference between Joe Biden and Donald Trump in their ability to handle the Communist China issue.10
Mind you, this was the same Sleepy Joe career politician who had not only sat on his hands for more than forty years on the China issue and voted to shoehorn Communist China into the World Trade Organization. This was also a candidate saddled with a coked-out unregistered foreign agent of a laptop-from-hell son in Hunter Biden who had gone into business with Communist China for the express purpose of selling American manufacturing companies to Beijing.11
OMG! WTF! Just pick your own internet acronym, clean or filthy, and you get the drift of what was going on in my mind as I grappled with what seemed to me cognitive dissonance in the American electorate. If after Donald Trump’s tough actions on Communist China, the Boss was only marginally ahead or in a statistical dead heat with Joe Biden on this pivotal and salient issue, then I did not know what the Hades was going on. At least, I didn’t know what was going on until I thought about it just a little bit.
After just a bit of reflection, it all boiled down to two specific problems. First, there was President Trump’s very public “bromance” with his counterpart in Beijing, Xi Jinping. Every time POTUS referred to this authoritarian murderer as “my good friend,”12 this didn’t just turn my own stomach. It turned off a good portion of the America’s swing voters—and likely all of the Trump base—who, in their own guts, knew quite better.
Second, there was also the quite legitimate perception that the president was pulling his punches on a wide range of China issues. Mnuchin’s weak-kneed, run up the white flag, Skinny Ass China Trade Deal was just the tip of this “pull our China punches” iceberg. There was also the very public embarrassment of a Wilbur Ross bellyflop on ZTE13, a Mnuchin- and Kudlow-driven waffling on the 5G network bandit Huawei,14 a Kushner Devil’s bargain on TikTok,15 and a truly unforgiveable Mark Meadows-driven “see no evil” accommodation to the most brutal of human abuses in Xinjiang Province.
Cumulatively, these pulled punches would make us punch drunk in the polls, and this would turn out to be yet another case of Bad Personnel leveraging Bad Process to turn Bad Policy into profoundly Bad Politics.
About That Toxic Trump Bromance
In the weeks leading up to the first major summit with China in April of 2017 at the Boss’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, I had frankly been bummed out that I was being left behind in Washington, DC. That’s right, me, the guy who was supposed to be the administration’s leading China Hawk was not on the Air Force One passenger manifest. Cherry blossoms yes. Orange blossoms no.
Of course, at some level, you could argue that that my exclusion might make sense if you were trying to make peace and a deal with the Chinese. Why bring the flamethrower?
On the other hand, through the Reagan lens of pursuing peace through strength, excluding me from the trip as a peace offering to the Chinese was fuzzy thinking at best. If you want to drive a good and hard bargain, particularly with the Butchers of Beijing, the likely best strategy is to show these beasts you mean business. What better way to signal this than to make me a key part of the negotiating team.
Fortunately, Steve Bannon, then still White House senior counselor and in his West Wing prime, would see it exactly that way. When Bannon noticed that my name was not on the travel manifest, he marched the thirty feet over from his cubby hole to Priebus’s spacious suite and told Reince that I had to be on the trip.
At first, as Steve would later tell it, Priebus was his usual high-pitched whiny self. Said Reince, “I don’t know, Steve. Navarro comes in kinda hot and he might get the Boss worked up. That’s what I’m hearing from [H. R.] McMaster and Kushner and [Gary] Cohn. They’re lobbying me hard to keep Navarro in Washington. So I just don’t know, Steve.”
Ever the strategist, Steve’s answer was to make it in Reince’s self-interest to have me on the trip. So he says to Priebus, “Reince, you know that the president, at some point during the trip, is going to ask ‘Where’s my Peter?’ And when he’s not there, it’s going to be your ass on the line—not McMaster and Cohn and certainly not Kushner.”
At that, Reince folded like a cheap suit, and that’s how I got a last-minute phone call from the chief’s office to get my own ass on the bus, and that’s how I wound up in Palm Beach, Florida with nothing but the suit on my back—and a tooth brush that I had grabbed from one of the bathrooms in Air Force One.
And sure enough, on the very next day, at a critical pre-planning meeting with our team and the Boss—which Cohn and McMaster initially kept me out of—POTUS looked around the room and then looked at Priebus and bellowed: “Where’s my Peter?”
So Reince came and got me from the adjacent room where Bannon had told me to hang out and be patient. And the rest is history—literally.
An Original Mar-a-Lago Sin
The Mar-a-Lago summit would turn out to be pure Trumpian pomp and circumstance—a truly grandiose summit where POTUS would wine and dine China’s president in the hopes of out-foxing and out-negotiating the most powerful dictator in the un-free world.
In truth, this event was also a pure Wall Street transactionalist power play, a profiteer’s pageant conjured up by Jared Kushner working—but really getting worked by—his Beijing back street channels. That’s just one of many things the young but not-so-precocious Kushner never really understood.
Every time Jared thought he was working Beijing, Beijing and its Wall Street agents like Steve Schwarzman, John Thornton, Hank Paulson, and Henry Kissinger were really working Jared.
Here, let me state what was obvious to everybody but Jared: What better way to slow down President Trump from imposing tariffs on China than for Xi Jinping to come and do a faux Florida kowtow leavened with extreme flattery?
Now let me state something perhaps more subtle: If the Original Sin of the administration was to bring far too many traditionalist globalist Republicans into key positions of power, the Original Sin of that first Mar-a-Lago Summit was to leave America’s president completely alone with the president of China for a private meeting and let them, shall we say, “bond.”
The story behind this bonding and the blossoming of what, at least from the outside, looked to be a very real Trump-Xi bromance brings to mind one of my favorite movie lines from the Paul Newman classic Cool Hand Luke: “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.”
In the case of the star-crossed Mar-a-Lago Summit, what we got was a “failure to brief.” What I am talking about here is not a failure to brief the president properly, but rather a failure to adequately brief the Boss at all.
During that Mar-a-Lago summit, POTUS and Xi would spend several hours alone together, with only their interpreters. During that intimate time, a literally teary-eyed Xi would spin his version of the well-known historical tale of woe known as China’s “century of humiliation.”
From 1839 to 1949, eight foreign nations, most prominently Great Britain, Germany, and France—the US was but a young pup at the time—would impose “unequal trade treaties” on China. These sometimes quite literally rapacious imperialists would also seize Hong Kong and Macau while turning rivers like the Yangtze and port towns like Canton effectively into international waters and trade zones.
In telling his teary-eyed tale of China’s loss of sovereignty, Xi Jinping weaved in the hardships that had been imposed upon his family ancestors. “Oh the pain and suffering,” weeped a wet-eyed Xi. Quick House of Cards aside: there is nothing scarier than a brutal dictator who can tear up on command.
Of course, what the weepy Xi left out of this tale of woe was that during the five thousand years prior to China’s one hundred years of humiliation, an imperial China had intermittently and brutally humiliated just about every other foreign country in Asia. Vietnam alone would be invaded repeatedly and occupied by China for more than a thousand years while these Chinese mandarins treated the Koreans worse than slaves.
It should have been a simple matter for the National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster to actually do his frigging job and brief the president of the United States before he sat down with Xi Jinping. Any damn fool—even the dullard McMaster—could have anticipated that Xi Jinping would play the century of humiliation card. But neither McMaster or anyone from the intelligence community bothered to conduct such a brief.
Because of that failure, the Boss came out of that summit with what at least appeared to be an admiration and adoration for a teary-eyed sociopath who was running concentration camps in Xinjiang and Tibet,16 pillaging the American economy, holding his own people hostage in digital and often actual Orwellian prisons, militarizing the South China Sea,17 and continuing preparations to crush democracies in both Hong Kong and Taiwan—yes, history will note that Xi Jinping took Hong Kong on our watch and shame on us.
Of course, it may also be true that much of the apparent love that the president would demonstrate for Xi was simply strategic—in the very same ways, his bromances with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and Russia’s Vladimir Putin were strategic. The president’s philosophy here—often waxed eloquent in the Oval—was that, as the saying goes, you can get more with honey than with vinegar, especially with a despot.
Here, however, I must also be candid. If the Boss had to spend a few hours with a world leader, he much preferred tough and masculine brutes like Xi, Putin, or Turkey’s Erdogan to effete, leftist, metrosexuals like Justin Trudeau of Canada or Emmanuel Macron of France. And with those two androgynous GQ gentleman in particular, I can particularly see the Boss’s point of view as Trudeau and Macron were nothing but leftist and globalist trouble at every summit we ever attended—to the point where POTUS had made me light up Trudeau on TV in a “special place in hell” way that almost lit my own self up. But the story behind that story is one for another time.
Winnie the Pooh Kowtows
Whether the Boss’s admiration for China’s dictator was real or simply a strategic ruse, it would not be until more than two years later at the June 2019 G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, that POTUS would finally, albeit quite accidentally, unmask the real Xi Jinping.
During the meeting of the two trade teams—with Communist China on one side of the flag-festooned table and the good old USA on the other—the Boss and the Butcher started out in the usual way. POTUS bittersweetly talked broadly about the need for more reciprocity in the trade relationship and about how he did not really want to impose tariffs but might have to—his classic Dragon in the Pot strategy that I discussed at length in my In Trump Time memoir.
For his part, China’s dictator in chief fawned and feigned to kiss the Boss’s ring by telling him what a great leader he was and how important it was for him to get reelected. Right. The very last thing on China’s Godless polluted earth Xi Jinping wanted was another four years of the Donald and his punishing tariffs.
Of course, by then, all of us on the trade team, as well as the president, were hip to Xi Jinping’s game. We knew that the Butcher of Beijing would come to the summit with lips prepuckered and with the goal of using his obsequiousness to further delay any new tariff actions.
We’d seen that game before, particularly at the critical 2018 G20 Buenos Aires summit. In the room where that happened, as I sat next to the lame-duck chief of staff, John Kelly, Xi Jinping performed his own unique version of a kowtow on steroids to stop POTUS from imposing additional tariffs.
It was, hands down, one of the great masterful political seductions of all time. All I could think of as this quintessentially Chinese Communist flattery unfolded was that my president, who had had every intention of slapping on tough new tariffs as he had entered that summit room, was in no way going to follow through on that intention. Winnie the Pooh had gone down so hard on the president, the only climax I was going to witness at the end of that meeting was going to be a no-additional-tariffs anti-climax—which was exactly what happened.
And by the way, lest I get accused of using obscure lowbrow literary references in this opus, “Winnie the Pooh” is the derogatory nickname many cynics and dissidents in China use for Xi Jinping. Of course, anyone who gets caught using that term in China is in for a long one-way train ride to parts and gulags unknown.
Xi Jinping Unmasked
Now, unlike the 2018 G20 Kumbaya Buenos Aires summit, Xi’s encounter with Trump at the Osaka 2019 G20 would not have the same happy ending. The Boss, in a quite accidental and offhand remark, claimed—with absolute historical accuracy—that if the United States had not come to China’s aid during World War II, China would have been lost to Japan.
With that remark, Xi’s flash of anger was so bright I thought I needed shades. Gone in a Beijing second was the façade of any obsequiousness. Vaporized was any hint of a kowtow. In this magic moment of the great reveal, Xi Jinping seemed to at least figuratively rise up on his Devil’s haunches and went off on a long rant about how the noble Communist Chinese troops sacrificed blood and treasure to drive out the evil Nipponese.
Of course, Xi Jinping left out the fact that it was the nationalist Kuomintang troops of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek who mostly got slaughtered trying to drive out the Sons of Nippon while Xi Jinping’s progenitors—Mao Zedong and his Long March band of Communists—hid out like cowards in the mountains.
Truth be told here—but never in any of Communist China’s history books—it would be the bleeding out of Chiang Kai-shek’s forces by the Japanese during World War II that would enable Mao and his Communist troops to quickly overcome Chang’s severely depleted nationalist forces after the war. By 1949, the insurgent and decidedly cave-rested Mao Zedong would drive Chang and his loyalists offshore to Taiwan.18
Of course, we heard none of that during Winnie the Pooh’s angry rant. Instead, we saw the total unmasking of Xi through his own harsh propagandist rhetoric.
As I watched this unfold, I had to restrain myself from laughing out loud—that certainly would have been an international incident. But at least I had a big “I told you so” grin on my face for all in the room to see.
Immediately after the meeting, there was an absolutely priceless moment as we on the American side went to a holding room before moving on to the next event on the calendar. With a wry or sheepish smile—I couldn’t quite tell which—the president acknowledged that he had finally seen the real Communist Butcher of Beijing. Said the Boss as his eyebrows rose, “Wow, did you see that? Finally, the true Xi Jinping.” True that.
My hope at the time was that with Xi Jinping’s unmasking, the president would forever more abandon the “my good friend” rhetoric and get down to the real business at hand. Alas, this was not to be.
A Dark John McEnroe Moment
Right at the dawn of the pandemic, President Trump would twaddle up a poisonous pair of buddy tweets that would reinforce the growing public perception that the president had needlessly softened not just on Xi Jinping and trade policy but also on the looming pandemic. Tweeted the Boss on January 24, 2020:
China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!19
At the time that I read that tweet, I was at my stand-up desk in my office at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. As my normally very low blood pressure sharply spiked, I literally let out a loud expletive. It was so loud that Garrett Ziegler, one of my staffers, came running in to see if something was wrong.
“You bet something is wrong,” said I to Garrett, pointing at the tweet on my screen, as I thought to myself: “This is full John McEnroe territory here. Boss, you cannot be serious!”
Yet serious it was, and the Boss’s tweet would turn out to be a missive so far from the facts of the pandemic case that it would have made even Alice in Wonderland’s head spin.
The killer here was not just praise for China “working very hard” at containing a virus that China was in fact responsible for genetically engineering and unleashing upon the world. It was also the absurd notion that Communist China—the most opaque large country in the world—somehow was exhibiting “transparency” when in fact it was hiding the genome of the virus even as it hid the potential of human transmission and a pandemic from the world.
And guess what: to this day, Communist China still has not divulged the original, genetically engineered genome of the virus. Such information would still be valuable today. But it would have been absolutely invaluable at that early stage of the pandemic.
Why? Because promptly having the exact genome would have allowed us to design a far more robust and complex suite of vaccines to fight China’s virus. Instead, we wound up with a far inferior set of experimental gene therapy quasi-vaccines that have proven to be far less effective—and far more dangerous—then a gaggle of liars from both the FDA and companies like Pfizer once promised us.
Regrettably, that first buddy tweet would not be the last. Just two weeks later, on February 7, the president would double down on his “trust in Xi Jinping” rhetoric with yet one more twaddling tweet:
Just had a long and very good conversation by phone with President Xi of China. He is strong, sharp and powerfully focused on leading the counterattack on the Coronavirus. Great discipline is taking place in China, as President Xi strongly leads what will be a very successful operation. We are working closely with China to help!”20
Talk about letting the Bully of Beijing off the hook. At this early stage in the pandemic, we damn well should have impaled Xi Jinping on the “demon” virus his minions had unleashed and kept our Trumpian boot to his damn neck throughout 2020. Instead, this pair of buddy tweets would set the stage for what would be the steady unraveling of the Boss’s Tough on China image throughout 2020
These tweets would only be eclipsed by one that I shall share with you shortly regarding the tawdry “ZTE Affair.”