Tuesday, May 29, 2018

Sounding Code Red: Electing the Trump Resistance



Thomas L. Friedman
Opinion Columnist
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CreditPool photo by Olivier Douliery

With the primary season winding down and the midterms soon upon us, it’s time to point out that this election is not about what you may think it’s about. It is not a choice between the particular basket of policies offered by the candidates for House or Senate in your district or state — policies like gun control, right to choose, free trade or fiscal discipline. No, what this election is about is your first chance since 2016 to vote against Donald Trump.

As far as I am concerned, that’s the only choice on the ballot. It’s a choice between letting Trump retain control of all the key levers of political power for two more years, or not.

If I were writing the choice on a ballot, it would read: “Are you in favor of electing a majority of Democrats in the House and/or Senate to put a check on Trump’s power — when his own party demonstrably will not? Or are you in favor of shaking the dice for another two years of unfettered control of the House, the Senate and the White House by a man who wants to ignore Russia’s interference in our election; a man whose first thought every morning is, ‘What’s good for me, and can I get away with it?’; a man who shows no compunction about smearing any person or government institution that stands in his way; and a man who is backed by a party where the only members who’ll call him out are those retiring or dying?”

If your answer is the former, then it can only happen by voting for the Democrat in your local House or Senate race.



Because what we’ve learned since 2016 is that the worst Democrat on the ballot for the House or Senate is preferable to the best Republican, because the best Republicans have consistently refused to take a moral stand against Trump’s undermining of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies, the State Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Civil Service, the basic norms of our public life and the integrity of our elections.

These Republicans have made the craven choice to stand with Trump as long as he delivers the policies they like on tax cuts, gun control, fossil fuels, abortion and immigration, even though many privately detest him.

It is up to the Democrats to say and do the opposite: To understand that as long as Trump is president, he’s unlikely to sign any legislation a Democratic majority in Congress would pass — but that’s not their job for the next two years. Their job is to protect America from Trump’s worst impulses.

Their job is to get hold of at least one lever of power — the House or the Senate — in order to oust the most corrupt Republican lawmakers who lead key committees, to properly oversee the most reckless cabinet secretaries, like Scott Pruitt, and to protect the F.B.I., the Justice Department and Robert Mueller from Trump’s intimidation.



I don’t write this easily. On many non-social, non-environmental issues, I’m not a card-carrying Democrat. I favor free trade, fiscal discipline, pro-business regulations, a democracy-expanding foreign policy, and I have an aversion to identity politics.

But all of that is on hold for me now, because something more fundamental is at stake: It’s not what we do — it’s who we are, how we talk to one another, what we model to the world, how we respect our institutions and just how warped our society and government can get in only a few years from a president who lies every day, peddles conspiracy theories from the bully pulpit of the White House and dares to call our F.B.I. and Justice Department a “criminal deep state” for doing their job.

So that’s why I have only one thought for this election: Get power. Get a lever of power that can curb Trump. Run for the House or the Senate as a Democrat; register to vote as a Democrat; help someone else register to vote as a Democrat; send money to a Democrat; canvass for a Democrat; drive someone to the polls to vote for a Democrat.

Democrats are never going to win the news cycle from Trump. He’s an attention-grabbing genius. But they can, and must, out-organize him, out-run him, out-register him and out-vote him.

Nothing else matters now. Remember the single stupidest statement from pro-Trump commentators after the election? It was: “The media took Trump literally but not seriously. But his supporters took him seriously but not literally.”

Actually, some of us took him seriously and literally — our only mistake was not taking him literally enough. I assumed that a candidate who lied so casually and so often in the campaign would also do so as president; I just didn’t think he would literally utter 3,001 false or misleading claims in his first 466 days in office. I feared Trump would indeed, as he vowed, tear up the Iran nuclear deal, withdraw from the Paris climate accord and start a trade war with China; I just didn’t think he’d literally do them all at once with so little expert input.

I figured Trump would try to destroy Obamacare; I just didn’t think he’d literally do it without having a better alternative — any alternative — in place. I figured Trump would seek to tighten the border with Mexico; I just didn’t believe that he’d literally ask Congress for $18 billion to extend the border wall. I knew we needed to “drain the swamp” of Washington; I just didn’t think the drain would literally have to start in Trump’s White House and the offices of his cabinet secretaries.



Still, Democrats can’t count on winning by just showing up. They still have to connect with some centrist and conservative voters — and that means understanding that some things are true even if Trump believes them: We do have a trade issue with China that needs addressing; we cannot accept every immigrant, because so many people today want to escape the world of disorder into our world of order; people want a president who is going to grow the pie, not just redivide it; political correctness on some college campuses is out of control; people want to be comfortable expressing patriotism and love of country in an age where globalization can wash out those identities.

Democrats need to connect with some voters on those issues but then take them in a constructive direction, in contrast with Trump’s destructive direction.

In the end, I don’t want to see Trump impeached, unless there is overwhelming evidence. I want to see, and I want the world to see, a majority of Americans vote to curtail his power for the next two years — not to push a specific agenda over his but because they want to protect America, its ideals and institutions, from him — until our next presidential election gives us a chance to end this cancer and to birth a new G.O.P. that promotes the best instincts of conservatives, not the worst, so Americans can again have two decent choices.

Again, this is Code Red: American democracy is truly threatened today — by the man sitting in the Oval Office and the lawmakers giving him a free pass.


Frank Bruni is off today.

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White House Moves Ahead With Tough Trade Measures on China

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Wilbur Ross, left, the United States commerce secretary, and Premier Li Keqiang of China in Beijing last year. Mr. Ross is expected to return to Beijing on June 2 to continue trade talks.CreditPool photo by Thomas Peter

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration said on Monday that it would proceed with plans to impose a series of punitive trade-related measures on China in the next month, intensifying pressure on Beijing as trade talks between the countries continue.

The White House said in a statement that the United States would move ahead with its plan to levy 25 percent tariffs on $50 billion of imported Chinese goods, despite recent remarks by Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, and other administration officials that the tariffs would be suspended while the countries continued their negotiations.

The administration had previously announced a list of goods that would be subject to tariffs, including flat-screen TVs and medical devices. It then held a series of hearings on the tariffs, giving the public a chance to influence the final list. The White House said it would detail the final list of goods that will subject to the tariffs by June 15, and the duties would be imposed shortly after that, the statement said.

The White House said the Trump administration would also move forward with restrictions on Chinese investment and with stronger export controls meant to limit the access that Chinese people and companies have to American technology — a measure the administration said was for national security purposes.


Those restrictions will be announced by June 30 and adopted soon after that, the administration said, adding that the United States would also continue to pursue a trade case it has filed against China at the World Trade Organization involving intellectual property rights.

Trade talks between the two countries will continue, the statement said, and the United States has asked Beijing to remove “all of its many trade barriers” that prevent American companies from doing business in China, and has also said that “tariffs and taxes between the two countries be reciprocal in nature and value.”

The White House has planned to send Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, to China on June 2 to continue the trade negotiations. The last round of talks concluded on May 19 with the countries announcing little progress toward resolving a long list of complaints the American negotiators had previously identified. President Trump subsequently said he was not satisfied with the negotiations, and that they had a “long way to go.”

Mr. Trump has often talked about challenging what he has described as China’s unfair trade practices, but his advisers are deeply divided over the best course for doing so. Some, like Mr. Mnuchin, have focused on a potential compromise deal that would require China to buy huge amounts of American products while still forestalling the possibility of a trade war.

Other advisers have pushed for tougher action, demanding that China make substantial reforms to its economy to end the subsidies it provides to developing industries and to allow American companies equal access in the Chinese market. Those requests in particular have provoked a backlash from China, which has threatened its own potential set of tariffs on $50 billion in American goods.


On Friday, Mr. Trump said he had reached a deal that would allow the embattled Chinese telecom firm ZTE to remain in business, raising criticism and fears from Congress that he was backing off from his tougher promises on trade.

ZTE has been hit with tough sanctions by the United States, and its fate had become a bargaining chip in negotiations, with President Xi Jinping of China appealing directly to Mr. Trump for help.

Colliders, Sundials and Wonder: When Science Is Your Destination

By Peter Kujawinski 
May 28, 2018
Towering clouds threatened rain as I biked near the French-Swiss border. My sturdy vélo de ville rolled over every type of surface, and complained only when I steered it into runnels of mud. The trail meandered past dormant vineyards, through forests and fields of cabbage, and under the watchful eye of a hawk. At one point I stopped to walk through an old cemetery and found Roman ruins.

The whole morning was so moody and atmospheric that often I forgot the world’s largest machine lay several hundred feet below. But then the trail curved in a way that evoked the Large Hadron Collider, the reason for my visit to the outskirts of Geneva. I had just begun a weeklong trip focused on science, and my first stop was the particle collider at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. It houses the 17-mile-long ring that is arguably the world’s most famous science facility.






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La Perle du Lac park in Geneva, Switzerland.CreditAlex Cretey-Systermans for The New York Times

In fact, CERN is so popular that free tours are often snapped up within seconds of being released. After monitoring CERN’s website for about two months, I finally found open spots at the end of January, which luckily coincided with modest winter airfares to Europe. So I booked a flight and started brushing up on my physics.




The Large Hadron Collider accelerates subatomic particles called protons to nearly the speed of light. At full speed, each proton zips around the collider 11,245 times every second while CERN scientists encourage them to smash into each other. Enormous detectors and worldwide computer networks comb through the debris of these collisions to try to find something novel and interesting.








In 2012, the Large Hadron Collider discovered the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle even smaller than a proton whose existence had long been theorized but never found. Actually proving that it existed gave physicists confidence that the standard model, the theory underpinning their discipline, was sound.

It also helped CERN become a tourist attraction, although that process had already begun when it was featured in Dan Brown’s best-selling novel “Angels & Demons,” as well as the popular sitcom “The Big Bang Theory.” Most of all, though, CERN drew the media spotlight in 2008 as the Large Hadron Collider was about to become operational. Several people not affiliated with CERN claimed there was a slight chance the collider could cause a world-destroying “micro black hole.” Although the claim was debunked, it helped CERN become a household name.








The morning before my visit to CERN, I biked along the Passeport Big Bang route, which traces the path of the underground ring. At a bike rental shop near CERN headquarters, I grabbed a free trail map as well as a pamphlet that introduced the Large Hadron Collider through Tintin-like cartoon characters. Whoever at CERN put it together had a lot of fun devising multiple-choice questions like: “Which of these particles circulate in the LHC? a) simpletons b) protons c) croutons.”



After biking for several hours, I was dangerously close to missing my long-awaited tour slot, so I turned back after making it a quarter way around the ring. I raced back to the CERN visitor center with a few minutes to spare, locked up my rental bike and tried unsuccessfully to wipe the countryside mud off my hands and pants.








The small welcome area was mobbed with visitors. Our guide was Klaus Batzner, a retired CERN particle physicist whose giddy excitement at the institution’s accomplishments more than made up for my limited comprehension of what he was saying. It wasn’t because of his accent. Particle physics is so complicated that it was like trying to understand a foreign language, particularly since high school physics was 25 years in the rearview mirror.

Our tour began with a presentation about CERN, and perhaps in a nod to lingering public awareness of the debunked micro black hole claim, we were told that during the visit we would receive less radiation than from dental X-rays. Thus reassured, we walked across the Geneva-bound tramline to the control room of the Atlas detector, one of the two detectors that discovered the Higgs boson. Next to the live video feeds of the detector was a plaque that summarized its lofty mission: “to advance human knowledge, to continue an endless quest to learn where we come from and why the Universe is as we see it today.”





Later, our group visited the building containing CERN’s original particle accelerator, the synchrocyclotron, built in 1957 as a way to help European science regain its feet after the destruction of World War II. The synchrocyclotron looked like the figment of someone’s fevered imagination: a Rube Goldberg device bathed in the fluorescent lights of a European dance club. We walked out of the building and the mountains shone crisp and clear in the afternoon light. Images of these progressively larger machines chasing ever-smaller subatomic particles stayed with me as I returned to my hotel — all those decades of scientific research steadily adding to humanity’s storehouse of knowledge.




The next morning, the rain that had been threatening finally arrived. It was cold, too, but I was fortified by strong coffee and the kind of buttery, flaky croissants that seem to occur by magic only in France and Switzerland. As I walked down to La Perle du Lac, Geneva’s exceptional lakefront park, rain clouds scudded grimly across the sky and the city felt like it was still asleep. I had another visit planned to CERN that afternoon, but first I wanted to go back in time several hundred years, at the Museum of the History of Science.




The museum occupies a 19th-century villa originally built for Parisian bankers. Gold-filigreed walls and inlaid wood floors presented a striking contrast to the Calvinist practicality of Geneva buildings. Each room contained science instruments dating back to the 17th and 18th centuries: hand-carved celestial globes, sundials, astrolabes, Crookes and cathode ray tubes (which led to the discovery of X-rays), the first microscopes, oscillators and electric motors, as well as a vast array of glass eyes.

I could have spent the whole day in that small museum, mainly because of the beauty of the instruments. Made of brass, wood, mirrors and the first fumbling electric wires, these machines still thrummed with the discoveries they enabled. I peered through a 300-year-old microscope and imagined what it must have been like to see the once-invisible hairs on a flea for the first time.





Outside, the rain still fell in cold, heavy drops. Before heading to CERN, I walked along the edge of Lake Geneva to look at the museum’s outdoor exhibition, a series of displays that featured old drawings and photographs accompanied by descriptions of these images by local scientists. Marc Ratcliff, a University of Geneva professor, chose an 18th-century drawing of aquatic microorganisms. “At the time this plate was produced,” he wrote, “very few people believed that invisible things existed.”

The tram ride from the museum to CERN was short and efficient, 20 minutes that spanned several hundred years. As I walked to the visitor center, the rain clouds lifted to reveal a stunning vision on the nearby foothills. I could see the exact altitude where rain had turned to snow, like a cosmic line drawn through the trees.





At CERN, I met Ana Godinho, the Portuguese director of the institution’s education, communication and outreach programs, as well as her Belgian colleague François Briard. We discussed CERN becoming a worldwide household name, as well as the institution’s plans to build more facilities for visitors. “The mystery around CERN works in our favor,” Ms. Godinho said. “It’s such a huge endeavor. Everything is big here, although we study tiny particles you can’t even see.” She marveled at the worldwide interest that engulfed CERN when the Higgs boson was discovered. Even non-physicists were drawn to the adventure of trying to find it, she said.

Maybe it’s my background as a diplomat, but I was also drawn to the collaborative nature of this research. During a time when strident nationalism has regained strength, the facilities that I visited during my week of travel seemed blissfully immune. Physicists, governments and universities from around the world contributed to constructing and building the collider. It’s a culture of working together that predates the Large Hadron Collider, as I was to learn later.





Because CERN was in the midst of its annual winter shutdown, which usually occurs between the end of December and mid-March, Mr. Briard was able to take me down to see the actual Atlas detector deep below ground. I stood on a small observation deck and gaped at this several-stories-tall machine, its interior pulled open for maintenance. The detector was a vast network of mirrors and wires that looked like the blown-up photograph of an insect’s eye I had seen that morning at the museum. I took dozens of pictures, but none of them truly captured its scope and grandeur. At the end of 2018, the Large Hadron Collider will begin a two-and-a half-year shutdown for major upgrades. Tours to CERN will not be affected, and there even may be a bonus for those visiting in 2019 and 2020 because of potential opportunities to visit underground detectors, according to Mr. Briard.

As I finished my visit and walked out of CERN, my ears perked up at the familiar sound of American-accented English. I peeked into CERN’s main hall and briefly listened to a presentation on DUNE, the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. This international collaboration will beam neutrinos back and forth like tennis balls through 800 miles of bedrock. I vowed to learn more, but instead that evening I shared a raclette-and-wine dinner with a gregarious Swiss couple, and promptly forgot about it.





Days later, though, I stumbled back upon the DUNE project in the Chicago suburbs. I was ending my week of science tourism with a visit to Fermilab, a national laboratory of the Department of Energy located in Batavia, Ill., about 45 miles west of the city. It houses the Tevatron, a predecessor of the Large Hadron Collider.

Like CERN, Fermilab is open to the public, conducting regular tours and also housing permanent exhibitions in its striking, midcentury Wilson Hall headquarters. While waiting for my tour to begin I discovered that the DUNE experiment is actually based in Fermilab. The facility’s proton accelerator will hurl neutrinos to a detector now being installed in Lead, S.D. CERN is helping to build DUNE’s detectors, just like Fermilab helped build significant parts of the Large Hadron Collider.





I peeked into DUNE’s primary control room until it was time to begin the once-a-month free tour of the Tevatron’s 4.26-mile ring and DZero, its primary detector. During its operational lifetime from 1983 to 2011, the Tevatron was a primary site of international physics collaboration, just like CERN is today. Tevatron researchers discovered the top quark, another subatomic particle, and helped lay the groundwork for CERN’s discovery of the Higgs boson.

It’s been only seven years since the Tevatron last fired up its particle beam, but it seemed like a much longer time ago. Today the Tevatron is a time capsule underscoring the blisteringly rapid advances in science, machinery and computing. Our tour group walked down a stairwell illuminated by the buzz and flickering of fluorescent lights, and entered an area that smelled like my grandfather’s basement tool room.





Compared to CERN’s gleaming, space-age facility, where retina scanners are used to access the elevators leading down to the Large Hadron Collider, visiting the Tevatron is seriously old school. In the DZero control room, notepads and pencils still lay where they were left many years ago, the monitors looked like they were repurposed from the Apollo Space Program, and a spare Macintosh IIci (property of the United States government, according to a prominent sticker) sat in the corner. Next to it was a well-thumbed-through Fermilab phone directory from 2000.




Two stories down, we walked through the DZero detector. It was a warren of narrow corridors, accessible via a series of ladders that were probably bought from a nearby hardware store. Dozens of handwritten warning notes decorated levers and handles. The air was cold down there, and musty from a combination of old electronics and disuse. Still, as I climbed up a rickety ladder to enter the two-story detector, I felt a giddy sense of adventure. I stood there, mouth agape, staring at tens of thousands of red and green wires, mirrors, rectangular detector panels and blinking control lights. A decade ago, this was all cutting-edge stuff.

After the tour finished, I took an elevator to the visitor’s gallery and observation deck onthe top floor of Wilson Hall. In the fast-disappearing light of a winter afternoon, I could see the circular berm that traces the route of the buried Tevatron. A nearby exhibit proclaims, “A beam of particles is a very useful tool” and goes on to list all the applications derived from this research. For example, we can “shrink a tumor, make a better radial tire, detect an art forgery, prospect for oil, and package a Thanksgiving turkey.” Similarly, CERN publicizes the fact that one of their researchers invented the World Wide Web in 1989. But to me these applications aren’t nearly as impressive as the basic research itself and the excitement of trying to answer the most fundamental question out there: Why is there something rather than nothing?

It was dusk when I left Fermilab, and the last rays of sun turned the prairie red-orange. As I drove toward the exit, an enormous coyote stared at me from a copse of broken stalks and cattails, its eyes immediately searching mine to determine whether it should run or stand its ground. Before visiting CERN and Fermilab, I probably would have just enjoyed that wildlife sighting and moved on to something else. This time, though, I went home and immersed myself in facts about coyotes.

During my week in Geneva and suburban Illinois, I visited an exuberant foreign country called science. It reminded me of so many reasons to travel — for sheer pleasure, to gain new perspectives and knowledge, or to feel more connected to someone you love. (I threw that last one in because my sister is a scientist.) However, I didn’t expect to be so inspired. Particle colliders and 300-year-old lab equipment revealed the better angels of our humanity.

An object from Geneva’s Museum of the History of Science lingered in my mind for weeks afterward. It was a slender tower made of copper, zinc, felt, glass and wood and it gleamed with the promise of a new era. This was the world’s first battery, built by the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta in the year 1800. Like everything else in the museum, its invention was a necessary building block to arrive at the wonders contained in Fermilab, CERN and our everyday devices. The battery “domesticized electricity,” said the note accompanying Volta’s invention. I liked the image of this: a fierce lightning bolt tamed, patted on the head, and placed into a container for future use.

Since then, I have imagined contemporaries of Volta, and the physicist himself, gazing at that first battery and reveling in the joy that comes from discovering new things, simply because it’s in our innermost nature to do so. It’s why I loved being a science tourist, visiting these places at the forefront of human knowledge. It was a rejuvenating tonic, one that left me excited about the future. I felt Volta’s joy too.

This is the first of a two-part series on science tourism.



Peter Kujawinski is a novelist and freelance journalist. He is the co-author of the middle grade books “Nightfall” and “Edgeland,” both published by Penguin Random House.
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page TR1 of the New York edition with the headline: Wonder Is the Destination. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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Monday, May 28, 2018

Trump’s Manchurian Trade Policy

Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist

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President Trump is using national security as a pretext for some tariffs while inexplicably ignoring it when it comes to a Chinese company.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

Remember “The Manchurian Candidate”? The 1959 novel, made into a classic 1962 film (never mind the remake), involved a plot to install a Communist agent as president of the United States. One major irony was that the politician in question was modeled on Senator Joe McCarthy — that is, he posed as a superpatriot even while planning to betray America.

It all feels horribly relevant these days. But don’t worry: This isn’t going to be another piece on Donald Trump’s collusion with Russia, which is being ably covered by other people. What I want to talk about instead are Trump’s actions on international trade — which are starting to have a remarkably similar feel.

On one side, the “Make America Great Again” president is pursuing protectionist policies, supposedly in the name of national security, that will alienate many of our democratic allies. On the other side, he seems weirdly determined to prevent action against genuine national security threats posed by foreign dictatorships — in this case China. What’s going on?

Some background: International trade is governed by a system of multinational agreements that countries are not supposed to break unilaterally. But when that system was created (under U.S. leadership) in 1947, its framers realized that it had to have a bit of flexibility, a few escape valves to let off political pressure. So nations were allowed to impose tariffs and other trade barriers under certain limited conditions, like sudden import surges.


Meanwhile, the U.S. created a domestic system of trade policy designed to be consistent with these international rules. Under that system, the White House can initiate investigations into possible adverse effects of imports and, if it chooses, impose tariffs or other measures on the basis of these investigations.

As I said, the conditions under which such actions are allowable are limited — with one big exception. Both the international rules and domestic law — Article XXI and Section 232, respectively — let the U.S. government do pretty much whatever it wants in the name of national security.

Historically, however, this national security exemption has been invoked very rarely, precisely because it’s so open-ended. If the U.S. or any other major player began promiscuously using dubious national security arguments to abrogate trade agreements, everyone else would follow suit, and the whole trading system would fall apart. That’s why there have been only a handful of Section 232 investigations over the past half century — and most of them ended with a presidential determination that no action was warranted.

But Trump is different. He has already imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum in the name of national security, and he is now threatening to do the same for autos.

The idea that imported cars pose a national security threat is absurd. We’re not about to refight World War II, converting auto plants over to the production of Sherman tanks. And almost all the cars we import come from U.S. allies. Clearly, Trump’s invocation of national security is a pretext, a way to bypass the rules that are supposed to limit arbitrary executive action.


And their economic side effects aside, the proposed auto tariffs would further undermine our allies’ rapidly eroding faith in U.S. trustworthiness.

Which is not to say that national security should never be a consideration in international trade. On the contrary, there’s a very clear-cut case right now: the Chinese company ZTE, which makes cheap phones and other electronic goods.

ZTE products include many U.S.-made high-technology components, some of which are prohibited from being exported to sanctioned regimes. But the company systematically violated these export rules, leading the Commerce Department to ban sales of those components to the company. And the Pentagon has banned sales of ZTE phones on U.S. military bases, warning that the phones could be used to conduct espionage.

Yet Trump is pulling out all the stops in an effort to reverse actions against ZTE, in defiance of lawmakers from both parties.

What’s behind his bizarre determination to help an obvious bad actor? Is it about personal gain? China approved a huge loan to a Trump-related project in Indonesia just before rushing to ZTE’s defense; at the same time, China granted valuable trademarks to Ivanka Trump. And don’t say that it’s ridiculous to suggest that Trump can be bribed; everything we know about him says that yes, he can.

And if we do have a president who’s bribable, that’s going to give dictators a leg up over democracies, which can’t do that sort of thing because they operate under the rule of law.

Of course, there might be other explanations. Maybe President Xi Jinping told Trump that he needed to abase himself on this issue to get a trade deal he can call a “win.” Somehow this doesn’t sound much better.

Whatever the true explanation, what we’re getting is Manchurian trade policy: a president using obviously fake national security arguments to hurt democratic allies, while ignoring very real national security concerns to help a hostile dictatorship.


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