In the face of “catastrophic” numbers and an impending midterm disaster, President Donald Trump is poised to end up as weak as he has ever been politically, and according to a new piece from The i Paper, his enemies in China are ready to take advantage.
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James Palmer is the deputy editor at Foreign Policy magazine, and has particular expertise in China, having lived there for 15 years between 2003 and 2018. In a new piece for The i Paper Sunday, he suggested that it “is never entirely clear” how much the Chinese government understands U.S. political happenings, as its leaders’ grasp of the subject is “often surprisingly poor, partly because some of its officials can’t fully comprehend the idea of democracy itself.” Beijing is also known to be more actively hostile towards Democratic lawmakers, given their tendency to attack its human rights record.
With all of that said, however, Palmer stressed that “if there’s one thing you learn in the cutthroat arena of Chinese Communist Party politics, it’s how to tell when an opponent is weak.”
“There are opportunities for China in the midterms,” Palmer explained. “If Democrats take back the House, and potentially the Senate, as polls suggest, Trump might struggle to get much done outside of issuing increasingly impotent executive orders. This could help Beijing, but Democrats may also be more likely to take up human rights issues Trump has abandoned. Meanwhile, a divided legislature could hold up arms for Taiwan or result in long government shutdowns that further weaken U.S. capabilities.”
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He continued: “Trump is on the back foot, both on the global stage and in domestic politics, and his language has become more bombastic as a result – except toward China. Ever since Xi turned the screws over critical minerals last year, forcing a partial climbdown from the U.S. President’s trade war, Trump has spoken of his Chinese counterpart in only admiring terms, at least in public.”
Palmer added that China “has no interest in bailing Trump out of his own failures,” while also lacking any real ability to sway the midterms one way or the other. Even if it could, he suggested that the government lacks the understanding to know which outcomes might benefit it more. Trump might also feel emboldened to go harder against China no matter the outcomes in November, and “Probably… doesn’t even know himself yet”
“Any attempt to contest the election results plays right into a long-running theme of Chinese propaganda: democracy leads to division and chaos,” Palmer concluded later. “Chinese state media already relishes images of fistfights in Taiwan’s parliament and news of mass shootings in the U.S. Another January 6 or an attempt by Republicans to block Democrats from being seated would get blanket coverage on Chinese news. But even if Trump looks weakened and America more divided after the voting is over, China is unlikely to push hard to upend the status quo.”
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