Naz El-Khatib: Trump’s capitulation to Xi, Putin
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In the past few weeks, we learned President Trump did nothing when he found out Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, successfully paid bounties to militants for killing American soldiers in Afghanistan and Trump begged China’s leader, Xi Jinping, to help him win reelection.
These are just the latest examples of Trump capitulating to the leaders of our two biggest national competitors, and they are unlikely to be the last. If there were doubts in 2016 as to who Trump puts first, he has erased them now by showing us he will always put his own political interests above the national interest — even if it means getting played by foreign dictators.
Take Trump’s hollow trade deal, which he made the centerpiece of his approach to China — and a centerpiece of his reelection strategy in November. Trump gave Xi concession after concession to secure a deal that delivered little and did even less to address the structural issues Trump promised it would. To entice Xi, Trump rushed to save the Chinese company ZTE — which had violated U.S. sanctions and poses a national security threat — citing “too many jobs in China lost.” He promised not to criticize Xi’s actions to repress freedom in Hong Kong and chillingly even encouraged him to build concentration camps in Xinjiang — where over one million people are detained and subjected to horrors like forced abortions and sterilizations — to protect trade talks.
Trump then gave Xi a free pass on the coronavirus in January and February. In the early weeks of the pandemic, what we needed most to save American lives and safeguard our livelihoods was information on the virus’ transmission and nature — information only China had at the time. But Trump twice refused the urgings of his advisors to pressure Xi for it, instead praising Xi on at least 15 occasions and saying “The United States greatly appreciates (China’s) efforts and transparency.”
Why did Trump do the opposite of what Americans needed and experts pleaded? Because he didn’t want to derail his trade deal, which was signed in January and went into effect in February. Researchers have estimated over 80% of American deaths from the coronavirus — by far the most in the world at over 130,000 and counting — could have been prevented if the administration had acted just two weeks earlier. But Trump put politics and his trade deal, which has already collapsed, before American lives and livelihoods.
With Russia, Trump has inexplicably put Putin first. Most urgently, Trump refused to stand up to Putin when he offered bounties to kill Americans in Afghanistan even though U.S. intelligence assessed that our soldiers died as a result. It’s a familiar pattern: Trump gushed over Putin in their first phone call, later lauded the brutal dictator as a “great guy” and “terrific person,” regularly sides with Putin over our allies, and publicly sided with Putin over Americans in Helsinki by rejecting the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 election.
After all this, it comes as little surprise that Trump asked Xi and Putin to help him win elections instead of putting Americans first by taking them on. As John Bolton, Trump’s former National Security Advisor, recently revealed, Trump begged Xi to use China’s economic clout to help him win re-election. As a candidate, Trump invited Russia to interfere in our elections on television. As president, when the U.S. intelligence community confirmed that Russia did, he denied it — and privately told two senior Russian officials that Russia’s interference did not concern him.
The revelations of the past few weeks are beyond the last straws in this disgraceful onslaught and should infuriate all Americans. After all, we, not a Russian or Chinese dictator, choose our leaders, and our leaders are supposed to put our country’s interests first — not their own.
The president has shown us his true colors. Having seen them, there’s only one way we can protect our national security, our troops, and the republic that so many of our forebears and contemporaries died to defend: We must vote Donald Trump out of office in November.
Naz El-Khatib, a North Hills native, is a foreign policy expert based in Washington, D.C.