Chinese President Xi Jinping humiliated Donald Trump on several fronts during his state visit this week.
On The Daily Beast Podcast, Joanna Coles and Hugh Dougherty explained the context of Xi’s meeting with Trump, during which the Chinese leader again warned of the Thucydides Trap, the theory that when an established power feels threatened by a rising one, war may ensue.
“This is a moment of strategic weakness,” Dougherty said. “But it’s also a moment where Xi is turning up, and when he talks about the Thucydides Trap... he has been helping Iran. He is providing Iran the rocket components for the chemicals that underlie the rocket fuel that powers their ballistic missiles... Those ballistic missiles have killed American troops. He is providing the coordinates. Russia and China are both providing intelligence to the Iranians on where American assets are.”
“China, we learned this morning from an intelligence leak reported by CNN, is providing details in real time, we believe, of movements in the Strait of Hormuz,” he continued. “That is information that is incredibly dangerous to American service members in the Gulf. And yet he got a state dinner.”
At the dinner, Trump invited Xi to tour the under-construction White House ballroom, which is slated to be not just a ballroom but an integrated military complex, complete with bunkers and bomb shelters.
“If I could go off-script... as a special treat in honor of President Xi and Madame Peng, I’d like to invite everyone in the room to visit through that beautiful curtain in the back door,” Trump said. “It’s all lit up and looks beautiful. It’s one year away from completion: the new ballroom that you’ve heard about, and you will see something that I think you will really love.”
Coles then weighed in on another matter.
“The other thing is that Trump, having written to Xi, saying ‘Please don’t buy Iranian oil’—China is buying almost all of Iranian oil, 90 percent, I think. So, he’s welcoming in a very clear adversary to America.”
Also on the podcast, Coles and Dougherty broke down the largely unexpected response to the president banning MS NOW, CNN, and Politico from the White House because he didn’t like their reporting: five major television networks halting their White House broadcasts.
“The White House decided they would select who was in the pool, and they weren’t going to allow CNN back in the pool,” Dougherty said. “So while this whole Xi event was going on, the pool remained in solidarity with CNN, something that... nobody in the White House had expected would happen.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and even Fox News paused their television coverage. As a result, Trump showed up much less on television, and at times was inaudible—even on the White House’s own livestream—due to the lack of microphones. Photographs of the 80-year-old president on wire services were also postponed.
“They thought they could divide and rule, but the pool has remained in solidarity until CNN is back in the pool,” Doughtery said. “They said they would not cover these events in the way that they normally would. So, we had much more limited filming of it, much more limited access to see what was happening.
“Now, if you’re Trump, that’s why you were melting down, because he lives to be on television,” he continued. “We’ve got three cameras here. That man would love 3 million. He wants to be all over the TV at all times, and obviously he wants to be adored. They cut off the feed and he was absolutely furious.”
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