re: #147 wheat-dogg

Others more expert than I have already weighed in on Trump’s anti-China tweetstorm, but I can tell you he’s playing with fire. Xi Jinping is hard-nosed and much better informed and educated than Donald Trump. China has a wide assortment of tactics it can apply to make Trump’s term in office a fucking nightmare for Trump.

Here’s my guess as to how this all played out, given my familiarity with the Trump playbook. He has this phone conversation with Taiwan’s president Tsai (who is pro-independence and anti-reunification with the mainland), and naturally tweets about it in his self-serving “Hey, guys, guess who I just talked to — another world leader!” way. Then, Trump is stupefied when everyone says he did a completely stupid thing. The White House is mad. Beijing is mad. State is mad. So, he tweets in his usual kneejerk fashion, “Well, she called ME!” (A lie) Then, he goes on a tweet rampage against China, as he does with SNL, The NY Times and anyone else who crosses him, which only makes things worse. And he doesn’t understand he’s made it worse.

Meanwhile, his numbskull supporters *praise* him for standing up to the Commies and all-but-recognizing Taiwan as a separate sovereign nation, which would have been just peachy if it were still 1966 and we hadn’t signed all these treaties and international agreements with China and Taiwan since then. In their “Red Dawn” version of world politics, there can be no grave consequences to flipping off China in favor of Taiwan, because Wolverines!

I think I need to invest in a T-shirt and ballcap, each with the phrase “I didn’t vote for Trump” in Chinese characters, if I plan to stay here any longer.

I think that’s about right. Clueless was a humorous movie about adolescents in the Valley, but it makes for a disastrous Presidency.

I think I’ll paraphrase a line from Max von Sydow from Hannah and Her Sisters:

If George C. Marshall came back and saw the state of the new American foreign policy, he’d never stop throwing up.