Chinese Propaganda Outlet Laments Trump 2024 Run: ‘A Tragedy’

Former US President Donald Trump gestures after speaking at the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Be
Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg via Getty Images

China’s Global Times state propaganda newspaper declared former American President Donald Trump’s announcement of a third presidential bid this week “a ‘tragedy’ of American democracy,” predicting on Wednesday that Trump’s return to politics would inspire “violence.”

Trump served as president from 2016 to 2020 and made confronting malign Chinese Communist Party influence the core of his administration’s policies. Among the many actions Trump took to reduce Chinese communist influence on the world stage and within America were the imposition of tariffs on Chinese products, blocking national security threats such as telecommunications company Huawei from doing business in America, and formally recognizing the Communist Party’s genocide of Muslim ethnic groups, particularly the Uyghur people, in East Turkistan.

In his speech on Tuesday announcing he would run against incumbent leftist President Joe Biden – deeply implicated in business deals with individuals tied to the Chinese Communist Party – Trump emphasized that he would prioritize leveling the economic and political playing field with China. Trump vowed an “all-out campaign to eliminate America’s dependence on China” if he returns to the White House.

In an article titled, “Trump’s launch of 2024 bid may exacerbate ‘US political fragmentation’, a ‘tragedy’ of American democracy,” the Global Times – which serves as an opinion mouthpiece for the Chinese government – acknowledged that the Chinese Foreign Ministry did not comment on Trump’s announcement as it is a matter of “internal affairs.” The Foreign Ministry routinely condemns other countries for allegedly interfering in China’s “internal affairs” by, among other things, objecting to China’s genocide of the Uyghur people and other human rights atrocities, and in turn claims to not meddle in foreign elections.

The Global Times nonetheless went on to declare, as an official entity of the Chinese government, that Trump running for president “will exacerbate US political division and violence,” citing “Chinese observers.”

“Trump’s run is undoubtedly further worsening political divides in the US,” the propaganda outlet asserted. “Trump is good at destroying his opponents’ character rather than targeting their political views in gaining support, and as long as Trump is still active in American politics, political fragmentation and violence will not abate but will intensify.”

The regime-approved “expert” claiming that Trump will cause violence, professor Li Haidong, went on to call the entirety of the American political system a “tragedy as the current manifestation of the US politics is that people expend too much energy and the country expends too many resources in the service of elections and politics itself, instead of letting the US politics serve the welfare of people.”

Chinese propaganda outlets routinely condemn the American political system, which allows citizens to disagree politically with the government without going to prison, as “chaotic,” compared to the “harmony” of a totalitarian communist system. The fact that Americans vote for new political leaders on a regular basis, rather than having a dictator such as Xi Jinping at the helm indefinitely, is depicted as producing “instability.”

Trump made the Chinese communist threat a centerpiece of his announcement on Tuesday that he would again pursue the presidency.

“For the first time in memory, China was reeling and back on its heels. You’ve never seen that before because the United States was outdoing them on every single front, and China was paying billions and billions of dollars in taxes and tariffs,” Trump said of his first term in office. “Instead of jobs and factories leaving America for China, they were for the first time ever leaving China for America.”

“That is why we will launch an all-out campaign to eliminate America’s dependence on China,” Trump vowed. “We will bring our supply chains, which are a disaster right now, you can’t get anything.”

The Chinese Communist Party, through its state media arms, openly celebrated Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential election.

“Good riddance!” proclaimed the state-run Xinhua News Agency in a now-deleted post to Twitter.

The Chinese government spent much of its effort combatting Trump’s agenda on tariffs imposed on Chinese products to help make American companies more competitive with Chinese industries, which routinely use slave labor to make it impossible for foreign companies to compete. Chinese companies have also been implicated in hundreds of intellectual property theft and espionage cases in the United States.

In 2018, Trump’s administration announced a move to impose $50 billion in tariffs on a variety of Chinese products including but not limited to televisions, car parts, and medical products. In July, Bloomberg reported that the effect of the tariffs in America was helping American companies survive the economic devastation caused by Chinese coronavirus lockdowns.

“For some companies, the first nudge they got to revamp their supply-chain lines came two years before [Chinese coronavirus], when then-President Donald Trump began slapping tariffs on Chinese products again and again,” Bloomberg observed.

“Generac Holdings, a maker of power generators, started mapping out plans to shift some production from China, and when the pandemic hit, those plans got supercharged,” the outlet noted in one example. “The company now gets more of its parts from suppliers in the US and Mexico, produces more generators near its headquarters outside Milwaukee and runs a brand new plant in a small town just north of Augusta, Georgia.”

The report also identified a 120-percent increase in the construction of manufacturing plants in America between 2021 and 2022.

Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter.

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