The Trump-Xi Honeymoon
An appeal for a consistent anti-authoritarianism.
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Evan Gottesman is the managing editor of The Next Move and director of communications and special projects at the Renew Democracy Initiative.
To the casual observer, the love letters Donald Trump is penning to Xi Jinping might feel like a window into an alternate reality.
“The man I am walking with is President Xi, of China, one of the World’s Great Leaders!” Trump gushed in a Truth Social post, sounding more like a teen who got a photo with their celebrity idol than the president of the United States.
Among his many titles, Xi is the general secretary of the Communist Party of China. Surely, the Donald Trump who lavishes praise on this communist leader could not be the same man who rattles on about the radical left.
Yet there Trump was in Beijing last week, going beyond the formal diplomatic motions to give Xi a bear-hug embrace.
We need to understand that Trump is a demagogue, not an ideologue. He will do what is good for number one. Xi is similarly flexible, as all Chinese leaders have been since Mao Zedong’s death half a century ago.
Despite being allergic to “socialism,” the MAGA rank and file will excuse Trump’s flirtatious behavior with China’s communist overlords.
“Everyone who is up in arms about Trump ‘kissing Xi’s ass’ needs to understand that this is realpolitik and dealmaking,” China hawk Melissa Chen wrote in a post on X as she sought to justify the president’s behavior.
Marxists twisted themselves into similarly awkward knots in the summer of 1939 when their hero, Joseph Stalin, made a deal with Hitler’s Germany, the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
Many reds back then put loyalty to the leader ahead of their principles. They had to get creative in order to justify the unholy marriage between Soviet communism and German Nazism.
(One communist, a young man named Erich Honecker, observed events from his cell in a Nazi prison. He is reported to have praised the pact as a diplomatic success for the USSR, even as he was jailed by the very people Stalin was now collaborating with. Later in life, Honecker’s hardline compliance with the Kremlin position would be rewarded when he was made leader of the Soviet puppet state of East Germany.)
Stalin toasted to the führer’s health, just as Trump now hammers out effusive Truth Social posts about Xi.
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Trump’s defenders argue that we should treat him like a magician: watch his hands instead of listening to the words coming out of his mouth.
(As if the American president’s words never carry real-world implications.)
Per Melissa Chen: “With Trump, ignore the optics and ignore what he says. Just look at his actions.”
So let’s look at his actions. Consider the case of democratic Taiwan.
Back in February, Trump blocked a congressionally-approved $14 billion arms package for Taiwan.
Taipei remains in the lurch—the deal has been frozen for months, with no sign of movement after the president’s visit to China. Whatever happens, the very fact that Trump blocked the sale and left it open ended after meeting with Xi is a political victory for Beijing, as CNN’s Aaron Blake points out. Under the 1982 US-China Joint Communique, Washington asserted that it “has not agreed to consult with the PRC on arms sales to Taiwan.”
Marco Rubio is already parroting Beijing’s framing of “peaceful reunification” between Taiwan and the mainland. Anyone who has borne witness to the carnage left behind by Russian soldiers in Ukraine knows what “peaceful reunification” looks like on authoritarian terms.
Some are calling the secretary of state Marco Rubiotrop, but I think he’s more Molotov. During its 22-month romance with the Nazis, the Soviet Union turned over German and Austrian communists to the Gestapo, just as the Trump administration has indicated it would be open to selling out America’s Taiwanese allies to China.
The Nazi-communist pact was a disaster in the last century just as a MAGA-communist rapprochement would be a disaster in this one.
In December 1939, with the Red Army and Wehrmacht marauding through Poland and the Soviets on the march in Finland, the British Daily Sketch declared: “Our task in this war is to defeat Hitlerism, but it is still Hitlerism if the aggressor is called Stalin.”
Such consistency is badly needed now.
The thing is, Trump doesn’t actually care about communism (nor, for that matter, does Xi). The president admires China’s dictator because he is a big man who rules over a big country with big parades, big ballrooms, and no regard for human rights.
What’s necessary in order to counter this sinister collaboration is a truly consistent anti-authoritarianism.
Not just anti-communist, as MAGA says it is while wrecking America’s constitutional order at home. Nor simply anti-MAGA, as the left professes to be while getting mushy when it comes to enthusiastic fans of the People’s Republic like Hasan Piker.
Anti-all systems of invasive control. Anti-conformity and anti-coercion, whatever the label that goes with it.
More importantly, we need to be for something: For freedom of speech and conscience, for dissent, for liberty, and for prosperity.
The only thing that unites far-right Americans with Chinese communists and Soviet-nostalgic Russian nationalists is the desire to dominate. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact ultimately fell apart in catastrophic fashion. Authoritarian bargains are liable to fracture when empires butt up against one another, spheres of influence start to overlap, and the egos of “big men” come into conflict.
The values of free-minded people, by contrast, are not zero sum. Our shared principles are our collective strength.
Agree completely with the Ribbentrop pact parallel. I half-expected a non-aggression pact to come out of Trump's visit to China. Maybe it did.