Is What’s Good for Tesla Good for America?
Trump’s oligarchs in China.
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Garry Kasparov is the chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative, which publishes The Next Move.
Donald Trump is back from China.
My colleague Evan Gottesman already wrote about the president’s trip in geopolitical terms: yet another abdication of American values and strategic interests to Xi Jinping.
I agree with that take, but I’d like to consider the China visit from a different angle: the president’s corruption.
Trump arrived in Beijing with several businessmen in tow.
It’s not out of bounds for a US president to include industry leaders in their entourage when visiting a major trade partner. Nevertheless, Trump’s actions require even greater scrutiny than his predecessors’ because of the openness of his corruption.
Here are just a handful of recent China-related examples of the president’s grift:
Last year, Trump gave a Chinese Communist Party affiliate a private White House tour—a reward for being a top buyer of the president’s memcoin ($TRUMP is a massive scandal by itself, if only people would pay attention).
Eric Trump, the president’s younger son, serves as executive vice president for development of the Trump Organization, which has extensive interests in China. Eric Trump joined his father in China “in a personal capacity.” (Imagine if the surname were Biden!)
In January, Trump purchased as much as $1 million in Nvidia stock, a week before approving some of the tech company’s transactions in China.
Lo and behold, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang also made it into the president’s delegation. Curious, isn’t it?
Americans of a certain generation may recall the popular saying (actually a misquotation), “What’s good for General Motors is good for America.”
Elon Musk was also included in Trump’s party in China. Is what’s good for Tesla good for America? I’m tempted to answer with an emphatic no, although Musk’s early involvement in the Trump administration—a terrible conflict of interest for a top government contractor—looks almost quaint compared with what’s come to pass more recently. In any case, the connection between Elon Musk’s personal wealth and the general public’s welfare is certainly much more tenuous.
The communiques published by each side after the visit touted achievements that their opposites were conspicuously silent on. The White House claimed $17 billion in Chinese agricultural investment—crickets from Xi and his underlings. Beijing heralded the reduction of US tariffs—something Trump would prefer not to spotlight.
Generously, we can say the net result for America is a big fat zero. Yet Musk still came home smiling. Trump’s sons are probably beaming too.
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Corruption is an aspiring strongman’s weakness. Authoritarians have a sort of warped social contract—people trade democracy for (the illusion of) prosperity and stability.
That mirage comes apart when the people see their fortunes fall while the leader and his cronies thrive. This is what happened in Hungary. As Viktor Orbán’s rule wore on, the gap between Hungarians’ wages and the salaries of workers in neighboring Central European countries steadily widened. All the while, Orbán and his associates got richer and richer.
Orbán’s naked corruption created an opening for Péter Magyar to score a landslide victory that even the would-be despot could not deny.
(The ousted prime minister’s allies are now racing to move allies are now racing to move wealth out of the country to avoid scrutiny under the new regime. Some are even seeking refuge in the United States of America, where the streets are gilded with fool’s gold.)
As Trump’s policies continue to shrink Americans’ wallets while flooding his personal coffers, the president’s opponents should mirror Magyar. A laser focus on corruption can unite people across the political spectrum. Voters may split on all sorts of thorny political issues, but they will rally in response to the type of gross malfeasance they can feel on their own skin.
