"Asked an unrelated question on the White House South
Lawn on Thursday, Trump volunteered a comparison between Speaker Nancy
Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.)
— and the leaders of the People’s Republic of China.
“I find China, frankly, in many ways, to be far more honorable
than Cryin’ Chuck and Nancy. I really do,” he said. “I think that China
is actually much easier to deal with than the opposition party.”
China, honorable?
China, which is holding a million members of religious minorities in concentration camps for “reeducation” by force?
China, which, according to Trump’s own FBI director, is, by far, the leading perpetrator of technology theft and espionage against the United States and is “using illegal methods” to “replace the U.S. as the world’s leading superpower”?
China, whose state-sponsored hackers were indicted just three weeks ago and accused of a 12-year campaign of cyberattacks on this and other countries?
China, whose ruling Communist Party has caused the extermination of tens of millions
of people since the end of World War II, through government-induced
famine, the ideological purges of the Cultural Revolution, and in mowing
down reformers in Tiananmen Square?
Trump has a strange sense of honor. In April, he bestowed the same adjective on
the world’s most oppressive leader, North Korea’s nuclear-armed
dictator: “Kim Jong Un, he really has been very open and I think very
honorable from everything we’re seeing.”
Now,
the president is declaring that China’s dictatorship, by far the
world’s biggest international criminal and abuser of human rights and
operator of its most extensive police state, is more honorable than his
political opponents in the United States.
In
Trump’s view, your opponents are your enemies — and your actual enemies
are your friends. How can you negotiate with a man who thinks like this?"
