The weakest strongman ever

Yes, the White House is calling them "public-service announcements." They are not. A public-service announcement promotes policy, like anti-drunk driving laws. What the president is doing is using tax dollars to air commercials created for his 2024 presidential campaign. With them, Donald Trump hopes to move voters against the Democrats in advance of the midterms. They are illegal. They use public money for partisan gain.

That said, the president's ads may end up serving the public in unintended ways. First, as I said, they are illegal. Anyone can see that. Second, they remind everyone Trump is the president, even though he won't be on the ballot in November. (His net approval on the economy among indie voters is 99 points underwater, according to CNN.) Third, and most of all, they remind everyone of promises he made to get reelected and promises he broke.

For instance, Trump says in one ad:

"With you at my side, we will demolish the ‘deep state.’ We will expel the war mongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists; we will cast out the communists, Marxists, and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media, and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all."

Let's see:

1. Trump covered up the Epstein files. On the right, that's "the deep state."
2. Trump attacked Iran, at Israel's behest. On the right, that's "globalist."
3. Trump honors communists like China's Xi and acts kinda communist himself: taking equity stakes in corporations, imposing illegal tariffs, undermining private enterprise.
4. Trump embodies "the sick political class." He has made over 28,000 stock trades using inside information to make hundreds of millions of dollars for himself and his family.
5. Trump has bullied and censored media – eg, Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel – and attempted to replace legit news with government propaganda. (It was called Trump TV, but no one watched.) The claim to "rout the fake news media" is undermined by the fact that Trump is using tax money to pay for TV ads for a campaign that does not exist.

If the president were surrounded by smart people who had the guts to talk to him truthfully, he might reconsider the wisdom of using tax dollars to buy air time for an old ad whose message is, more or less, HERE'S WHY YOU'RE MAD AT ME AND MY PARTY. Trump is not surrounded by smart people with guts, but instead bootlicking pricks who are going to see the scam through to the end. With the price of gas and diesel burning up the economy, especially the agricultural economy, the White House deputy chief of staff nevertheless thought it would be productive to post this video over the weekend. (It appears to be AI.)

But Trump does not need an illegal ad to remind us that he does not believe a word he says. That's accomplished by his actions since returning to office, most recently his decision to honor Xi Jinping, the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, with a lavish state dinner.

Remember that, for Trump, China has long been a scapegoat. He blamed "the China virus" for the pandemic. (Wuhan province is the source of the "lab leak" conspiracy theory.) A million died not because of Trump's rank incompetence, but because China "weaponized" the covid.

The president has blamed China for cheating on trade. This allegation is the load-bearing pillar on which is based the idea of reorganizing the economy to be "America First." In reality, however, he has accomplished little except adding to inflationary forces, like the Iran War, that are driving up the cost of everything. Trump's illegal tariffs are now costing workaday Americans about $231 billion a year, or as much as $2,500 per household, according to an assessment by the Democrats on the congressional Joint Economic Committee.

In July, during a prime-time speech, Trump blamed China for the fact that he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden. Trump called it "the largest compromise of election data in history." Because of China's "sinister election meddling," Trump called for the passage of the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizens to vote, above and beyond what's already required. Trump threatened states with the loss of counter-terrorism funding if they did not change their election laws. He sued 30 states to force the release of their voter rolls.

(Trump is obviously not alone. The Republican Party habitually blames China for problems created by the Republican Party, or as cover for doing what they really want to do, for instance, rigging free and fair elections. Just this morning, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson told Fox Business that popular rage against data centers, especially in rural areas where the GOP dominates public affairs, "is a Chinese psy-op. I really believe that. That's not a conspiracy theory." Whenever a Republican says "that's not a conspiracy theory," it is.)

So, for Trump, China is to blame for, well, you name it. Over the last decade, Trump has said America has got to get tough on China or suffer the consequences. But last week, when it came time to face the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, what did Trump do? Did he show toughness? Was he the strongman America needs? Here's the Times: "any public hint of that concern disappeared, replaced by an ebullience that bordered on gushing."

In 2016, presidential candidate Donald Trump said, "we can't continue to allow China to rape our country, and that's what they're doing. It's the greatest theft in the history of the world." But a decade later, he said, "President Xi and I have forged a friendship, a truly great friendship, actually." On social media, he added that the meeting was one of "friendship, strength and success." He said Xi looked “strong, vibrant, and fit — better than ever.”

Watching it all, Max Boot said, "Trump’s most important transformation has been from China hawk to China dove." But that almost certainly overstates reality. He didn't mean what he said back then. He doesn't mean what he says right now. Nothing matters, except what's personally beneficial to him, not even the fact that China is helping Iran kill Americans in the war. (He refused to call out Russia for doing the same thing.) For God's sake, Trump's nihilism is such that, according to the AP, he actually asked Xi if he would be interested in buying US armaments. That's not a strongman. That's a man who will say anything for a buck.

In the end, it may be a public service for Trump to run ads for a campaign that no longer exists, thus reminding everyone of the things that he said, and the fact that he didn't mean them. But no ad is needed. Trump sold the idea that he would make America great, in part by being tough on China, but when faced with a chance to confront the enemy, he flinched.

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