Trump did the right thing re: China, perhaps the WHO as well; the executive order re: Twitter and the tweet about looting and shooting? Not so much

Credit must be given where it's due. The VSG made the right move announcing in this afternoon's press conference that the US is going to eliminate policy exemptions for Hong Kong now that it's no longer autonomous. his rhetoric made clear that China has served notice that it's one of the world's bad guys.

This is going to make life inconvenient for US-headquartered companies with business ties to Hong Kong, but a stand had to be made.

Likewise, the World Health Organization has shown by the way it has soft-pedaled China's role in the global spread of the coronavirus that it is not without biases that run counter to its ostensible mission.

It is not nitpicking, however, to note that Trump did not say a word about the George Floyd murder and the ensuing now-nationwide urban unrest. A call for things like healing and justice would have been a much-welcomed way to start off the presser. And it might have been useful as a way to start walking back that awful "when the looting starts, the shooting starts" tweet.

Also, his executive order that seeks to create new regulations on social-media companies is off-base in several ways. Any such regulation would need to come from the legislative branch. More fundamentally, Twitter et al are privately owned organizations and in no way beholden to anybody but their shareholders. (Can you tell I've been hanging out with libertarians lately?) And to those who would immediately retort that they're so big and influential that they pretty much constitute public utilities, I would reply by saying that acting in a responsible manner and keeping blatant lies, vicious invective and threats off of their sites is good for the bottom line.

Memo to the Trumpists: calling for regulations is not a conservative way of proceeding.

A typical day in Trumpworld: a good move, two bad moves.

China brings the hammer down

A statement by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo acknowledges that Hong Kong can no longer be considered autonomous.  A confluence of events has made this possible. Every other country in a position to have exerted any kind of influence has been preoccupied with its own coronavirus predicament. The pandemic dampened the resistance fervor within Hong Kong itself, and proved a useful tool for the CCP to use to quell unrest.

This new security law that the Chinese Communist Party has imposed on Hong Kong is quite open-ended. "Sedition, foreign influence and secession" can and no doubt will be interpreted widely.

Given Hong Kong's status as a major financial center, this is sure to change the economic dynamic for the Pacific rim and around the globe.

China will surely be emboldened now regarding its relationship with Taiwan and South China Sea territorial claims currently disputed by the Philippines, Vietnam and other southeast Asian nations.

It's time for not only Western governments but businesses as well to reconsider the footing on which they engage China. Quite obviously, US corporations can't uproot their supply chains overnight, but planning for shifts to countries that don't constitute a blatant threat, which China has unmistakably shown itself to be, needs to start. The US government needs to shore up its alliances in China's neighborhood, and increase its naval presence in the region's international waters.

History is a funny thing. One day, a nation that the world had long been treating as problematic but essential in the shaping of the world-stage dynamic confirms the world's worst fears and shows that it is indeed a rogue element and nobody's idea of a responsible partner in the search for stability.

Even when signing the two bills supporting the Hong Kong protesters, the VSG has to genuflect to Xi

What to remember when the throne-sniffers try to make this look like an act of foreign-policy vision and courage:

And here is how their hero, “Pantywaist” Trumpkov, explained his signage of the bills, for the signing of which he had already publicly begged for Xi’s forgiveness in advance on live television:

“I signed these bills out of respect for President Xi, China, and the people of Hong Kong. They are being enacted in the hope that Leaders and Representatives of China and Hong Kong will be able to amicably settle their differences leading to long term peace and prosperity for all,” Trump said in a statement.

If you can read that statement three times, and yet continue to call Trump’s act a “major rebuke” to China, then congratulations! You’ve just become an honorary regional vice-president of the Trump Cult!

He signed it “out of respect for President Xi” and “China” — and oh, yeah, also the people of Hong Kong. Because he hopes they will all be able to “settle their differences,” which is what we all hope for when a totalitarian giant is trying to subdue a tiny and defenseless independence-minded city-state, isn’t it?

This “president” just gets punier and punier every day, doesn’t he? (That’s “huger and huger” for those of you in the cult, of course.)

Gotta protect the trade-relations atmosphere for that big deal, because winning in deals everything to the Very Stable Genius. Plus, he reserves his real respect for autocrats. He likes tough guys (think here Mike Tyson).   He doesn't think military personnel who've been captured are as heroic as those who weren't (think here John McCain). 


What a small person.

Another disgusting snippet from that Fox & Friends interview

As I said in my post yesterday about the VSG's call-in to the FNC morning show, I don't watch daytime TV as a general rule, so I'm picking up the various humdingers he let loose with as I poke around.

And this one is right up there with the business about Yovanovitch not hanging his picture in the Ukraine embassy and the tinfoil hat theory about CrowdStrike:

President Trump toed the line on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests amid trade negotiations with China on Friday, telling Fox & Friends that “we have to stand with Hong Kong, but I’m also standing with President Xi.”

Trump said Friday that there is “a very good chance to make a deal,” with China, after reports in October suggested that a phase-one deal had been agreed to in principle, only for the Chinese to stall the process. The president also said that the Hong Kong situation was “a complicating factor” in negotiations, but also claimed negotiations were the reason China had not cracked down harder on protestors.

“If it weren’t for me, Hong Kong would’ve been obliterated in 14 minutes,” Trump said. “He’s got one million soldiers standing outside of Hong Kong, that aren’t going in only because I ask him ‘please don’t do that, you’ll be making a big mistake, it’s going to have a tremendous negative impact on the trade deal.’ And he wants to make a trade deal.

“I stand with Hong Kong, I stand with freedom, I stand with all of the things that I want to do,” the president continued. “But we are also in the process of making the largest trade deals in history.”

The president did not comment on whether he would sign the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, which was passed by the Senate with a bipartisan veto-proof majority on Tuesday.

So many layers of the VSG approach to being president on display here. There's the equivocation. (Someone on Twitter posed the question, can you imagine Ronald Reagan at the Brandenburg Gate in 1987 saying, "Well, Mr. Gorbachev, it would be nice to see this wall come down, but you have to do what's right for the Soviet Union.") There's the wildly inflated view of his influence. There's the prioritization of deal-cutting over all else.

I think Daren Jonescu brings the laser focus of moral clarity to it:

Being on the winning side of history, where Trump so desperately yearns to be — think of how often he makes “winning” his own claim to fame and chief promise to supporters — is an unprincipled coward’s concern. That is why Trump, the unprincipled coward par excellence, supports every brutal dictator at the expense of that dictator’s slaves or potential victims. He does not see right and wrong, good and evil, freedom and tyranny. He sees only “power” and “winning” vs. “weakness” and “losing.” (The scare quotes in that last sentence are meant to indicate that Trump’s perspective on power and victory is the backwards outlook of a moral coward and intellectual weakling.) He therefore admires those who show an ability to maintain or expand their power, regardless of how they do it.

To my friends, past and present, who are willfully blinding themselves, or at best pretending the above concerns are mere peccadilloes or minor reservations about Trump’s judgment, I present a simple and sincere challenge: Please defend this punk’s actions on the world stage as anything less than treasonous.

This stuff has to be said. And stop it with the binary-choice attempt to shut down the discussion. That is not the only matter before us. And people sound stupid when they reduce it to that.

Hong Kong and the UK: the common theme of how to regard centralized authority

Two stories are currently unfolding, in disparate places, with different kinds of developments at present, but it seems to me there's an underlying theme.

Boris Johnson's own Conservative Party turned on him to join with Labor in taking control of Parliament and forcing Johnson to resume talks within the framework of the Treaty of Lisbon's Article 50, which establishes the two-year time frame for an EU country negotiating to leave that body. Boris was hot, pointing out that the move empowers the hard-left Jeremy Corbyn. Hot enough to call for snap elections, a move he'd rather forcefully spoken against.

And Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam has withdrawn from legislative consideration the extradition bill that triggered huge protests that at one point shut down the Hong Kong airport. In recent days, reports of private moments at odds with her public face of steely resolve had emerged. She seems pretty sincere in her heartbreak over what had happened to her nominally independent land.

Particular circumstances in each case, obviously, but the common element is the question of what degree of centralized authority does or does not serve an independent entity's flourishing.

For the moment, it looks like in the latter case, the move is in the direction of greater freedom and sovereignty, while in the former case, the cattle-masses who are fine with submitting to a bureaucracy in Brussels have at least a momentary upper hand.