Editor’s note for Wednesday, June 17, 2020

Dear Access member,

The grotesque narcissism and Islamophobia of the American president is on full display in a firsthand account of former national security adviser John Bolton, published today in the Wall Street Journal (paywall). In an excerpt from Bolton’s upcoming book, we find depressingly unsurprising details about Trump’s interactions with Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 in 2018 and 2019.

In Buenos Aires on December 1, [2018] at dinner, Xi began by telling Trump how wonderful he was, laying it on thick. Xi read steadily through note cards, doubtless all of it hashed out arduously in advance. Trump ad-libbed, with no one on the U.S. side knowing what he would say from one minute to the next.

One highlight came when Xi said he wanted to work with Trump for six more years, and Trump replied that people were saying that the two-term constitutional limit on presidents should be repealed for him. Xi said the U.S. had too many elections, because he didn’t want to switch away from Trump, who nodded approvingly…

In their meeting in Osaka on June 29, [2019]…Trump…turned the conversation to the coming U.S. presidential election, alluding to China’s economic capability and pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win. He stressed the importance of farmers and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome. I would print Trump’s exact words, but the government’s prepublication review process has decided otherwise… 

Xi agreed that we should restart the trade talks, welcoming Trump’s concession that there would be no new tariffs and agreeing that the two negotiating teams should resume discussions on farm products on a priority basis. “You’re the greatest Chinese leader in 300 years!” exulted Trump, amending that a few minutes later to “the greatest leader in Chinese history.”

Bolton also detailed Trump’s indifference to human rights — Trump allegedly said, “Who cares about it? I’m trying to make a deal. I don’t want anything,” when Bolton brought up the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre — and Trump’s well-known Islamophobia, as applied to the modern-day atrocity in Xinjiang:

Trump asked me at the 2018 White House Christmas dinner why we were considering sanctioning China over its treatment of the Uighurs, a largely Muslim people who live primarily in China’s northwest Xinjiang Province.

At the opening dinner of the Osaka G-20 meeting in June 2019, with only interpreters present, Xi had explained to Trump why he was basically building concentration camps in Xinjiang. According to our interpreter, Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do. The National Security Council’s top Asia staffer, Matthew Pottinger, told me that Trump said something very similar during his November 2017 trip to China.

While Trump’s backstabbing of U.S. allies is probably the primary reason that Beijing doesn’t mind another four years of the same American administration — Bloomberg recently interviewed nine current and former Chinese officials, finding a “belief that the benefit of the erosion of America’s postwar alliance network would outweigh any damage to China from continued trade disputes and geopolitical instability” — the ease of flattering and lack of values can’t hurt, either.

Bolton’s chapter excerpt ends, “The Trump presidency is not grounded in philosophy, grand strategy or policy. It is grounded in Trump. That is something to think about for those, especially China realists, who believe they know what he will do in a second term.”

We should note that U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer has denied “that Trump asked Xi Jinping for help with 2020 election,” and that despite Trump’s obvious personal indifference to the plight of the Uyghurs, he has signed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act, after it passed Congress nearly unanimously last month.

We suspect that, given the timing — Trump signed the Uyghur bill within an hour of Bolton’s book excerpt being published — Trump is responding to it being reported for the first time that he personally OK’d concentration camps.

Meanwhile Xi Jinping has been schmoozing Africa: here is the full text of his speech at an “Extraordinary China-Africa Summit on Solidarity against COVID-19,” where he promised much support for African countries. There are links to further coverage in the Politics and Current Affairs section below.

Our word of the day is Line of Actual Control (实际控制线 shíjì kòngzhì xiàn), the name of the fuzzy border line between India and China. See our top story for more on the high altitude tensions between the world’s most populous two nations.

—Jeremy Goldkorn and Lucas Niewenhuis