Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, is wrong. Donald Trump’s latest remarks, in which he attacked not just China but the “deep state” inside his own country, the intelligence officials who briefed him in the White House, and America’s electoral system, were not the “ramblings of a mad king”.
They were much worse than that.
If Trump believed it was the case that Beijing was attacking the very foundations of American democracy in the most direct and verifiable way – by buying voter data and making fake ballots – then China would be, and should be, under economic sanctions.
Xi Jinping’s agents of turmoil would, and should, be rounded up and expelled. America’s technological systems would, and should, be purged on a gigantic scale, and we would, and should, be tossing our iPhones into the toilet bowl.
China is a malevolent force, but is much more subtle than that. It has subverted the West’s independence by getting us all addicted to its manufactured products, just as the British got China addicted to opium. China has stolen hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of intellectual property from the West. And now China is strangling access to rare-earth minerals, crippling the ability of Western battery manufacturers to compete with its strategic control of next-generation technologies.
Trump knew all this when he recently visited the Chinese leader in Beijing. He may have mentioned these issues behind closed doors, but in public, the relationship between the two leaders could not have appeared more cordial.
But now, Trump has delivered a presidential broadcast from the White House to announce that the US elections are vulnerable to “hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference”, and accused the People’s Republic of China of carrying out “the largest compromise of election data in history” simply by acquiring election data – much of which is commercially available for purchase by political campaigns and other interested parties.
“They wanted to just make you sound like your president wasn’t so hot, when actually, your president has done a great job. And they did everything possible to do exactly that,” he said.
Trump’s Republican Party is experiencing terrible polling, and is set to be damned by association with the presidency come the November midterm elections to Congress. According to a recent Ipsos poll, 61 per cent of Americans disapprove of the way that the president is running the country.
And he is making sure that the country is prepared for what he might next unleash – which is not a “mad king” moment, but an all-too-rational consolidation of the power grab he has already enacted on America’s pillars of authority.
He has met with some resistance to his ongoing coup from elements within the US judicial system, while some states (notably Minnesota) have seen off his deployment of stormtroopers from ICE, but his control over the US security establishment is now almost total, and deepens every day.
Any and every officer who wants to advance to the top ranks in the defence or intelligence establishment knows that he – and these days, it is almost always a he – will need to have a long record of sycophantic support for Trump.
The president blames men like former general Mark Milley, who was chair of the joint chiefs of staff when he was first elected, for thwarting his efforts to subvert America’s democratic processes when American securocrats called themselves the “grown-ups in the room” and mitigated some of Trump’s worst instincts.
Trump told America that the “deep state” had conspired against him in 2020, along with China, to rob him of the election he lost. He has pardoned almost all of those who conspired to overturn those election results by mounting a violent attack on Congress on 6 January 2021.
Now, he is trying to ram legislation through the US Congress that would disenfranchise huge numbers of voters who might vote against his party in November. He is calling it the SAVE America Act.
The US has been the subject of widespread and systematic social-media election interference perpetrated by Russia, mostly in support of Trump, and by China.
Both nations have weaponised the internet to sow discontent, manipulate voters, and create a universal sense of distrust in the structures that underpin Western democracies. But no one has done as good a job of disrupting the US constitution as Trump himself.
His public attack on China is not a geostrategic play; neither is it a wider reckoning with the growing power of Beijing. He is preparing the ground for the outcome of the November elections, because it looks increasingly likely that they may not go his way.
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