by Mark C. Eades
As an American living and working in China, I have a number of observations to offer from that perspective on Donald Trump, his so called “presidency,” and the COVID-19 crisis. Appropriately, the picture above is one from Trump’s own tweets of himself as a modern-day Nero, fiddling while America burns. I would like to begin my observations, however, with an even more appropriate description of Donald Trump from Amanda Marcotte recently at Salon:
“The most remarkable thing about Donald Trump is that he is a man with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Most people, even the most evil, have a thing or two you can say about them: Harvey Weinstein had a discerning eye for movies. O.J. Simpson was a tremendous athlete. Nazi sympathizers Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford were successful pioneers in their fields. But Trump has been a failure in every way — as a businessman and as a human being.... His only successes, as a reality TV host and a presidential candidate, were due not to any redeemable qualities, but to his total lack of them.... Trump’s only marketable skill, simply put, is being an asshole.”
I have had exactly the same thought hundreds of times, though the people I compared Trump to in my thoughts were former U.S. presidents generally considered — at least by Democrats — to have been bad presidents. There are lots of bad things that one can say about Richard Nixon, but in his favor it can also be said that he founded the Environmental Protection Agency and seems to have had at least some genuine concern with environmental issues. Nixon also started the process of normalizing relations between the United States and China with his famous trip to China in 1972, often described as the single most important U.S. presidential trip ever; and a diplomatic achievement that ultimately helped bring an end to the Cold War. America’s relationship with China today is a mixed and complicated one, but no relationship at all doesn’t seem a very good alternative.
There are likewise lots of bad things that one can say about George W. Bush. Unlike Trump, however, Bush didn’t hate immigrants, and could at least be considered a moderate if not a liberal on immigration policy. As president his views on immigration were certainly more moderate than most Republicans in Congress; and in the Trump era he has continued to speak up on behalf of immigrants, describing immigration as “a blessing and a strength.” Bush never called anyplace a “shithole country,” and I can’t imagine him having migrant children taken from their parents and put in cages. Despite his misguided prosecution of the “War on Terror,” Bush at least had the decency to speak out against Islamophobia at home, and never sought to implement a ban on Muslims entering the United States. I didn’t vote for Bush, because I never vote for Republicans, but I can at least look at an image of his face without feeling the urge to vomit.
On Donald Trump, however, there is absolutely nothing positive that can be said. He is, as Amanda Marcotte correctly observes, “a man with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.” There is probably no president in the history of the United States who provoked the kind of personal disgust in people that Trump provokes in millions upon millions of people, not just in America but around the world. He is probably the most hated living person in the world today, and for good reason: He is not just a terrible president, but a perfectly loathsome excuse for a human being. The mere sight of his face or sound of his voice makes me physically ill, and I don’t think I’m the only one who feels this way. That he commands greater loyalty from Republicans than did either Nixon or Bush says as much about Republicans as it says about Donald Trump.
In Benito Mussolini’s defense, it has often been said (perhaps spuriously) that at least he “made the trains run on time.” Donald Trump would be incapable of doing even that, and would probably have no interest in even trying, since nobody goes to his golf resorts by train.
I recently returned to Daily Kos after an absence of some time, and this is my second diary post at my new account (my old account seems to have disappeared during my absence). As my profile says, I’m a U.S. citizen, California voter, and member of Democrats Abroad living and working in China. My U.S. home is in the San Francisco Bay Area, and on my return flight each summer vacation, I always look forward to that descent off the Pacific over the Golden Gate and “The Cool, Grey City of Love.” For most of the past decade, I have taught at universities in and around Shanghai, San Francisco’s official sister city in China. My first visit to China was nearly thirty years ago. Currently I’m teaching in the resort city of Hangzhou about an hour by train from Shanghai. I’ve been in China throughout Trump’s presidency except for vacation visits to the United States, and throughout the COVID-19 crisis.
Watching the nightmare of the Trump presidency unfold from across the Pacific has been disturbing, to say the very least. In addition to my diaries at Daily Kos, I have also published extensively on China with newspapers and foreign affairs publications in the United States and Hong Kong. My published views on the workings of the Chinese government are quite critical, for obvious reasons. I have held off from publishing on China for the past year or so, partly because it’s a bit riskier to do that now than in the past when one is working in China; and partly because I find it harder to criticize China in view of what Trump and the Republican Party are doing in America. During previous U.S. administrations, there was a much clearer contrast between the United States and China. Now, as Donald Trump’s America comes increasingly to resemble an authoritarian state, the differences between our two countries have become blurred.
Visiting and living in China for as many years as I have, seeing how an authoritarian state operates, what kind of thinking and political culture it engenders, it is strange to watch as Donald Trump's America takes on an increasingly similar appearance. As in any authoritarian state, we in the United States now have a president and an administration that simply make up their own "alternative facts" when actual facts become inconvenient (which is always). We have right-wing media that now resemble authoritarian state-run media, creating an entire alternate reality for their viewers and readers to inhabit. Without government-imposed censorship, at least for now, we have a large portion of the U.S. public living in a right-wing information bubble through self-imposed censorship.
Watching the COVID-19 crisis unfold in the United States has been shocking, even as Trump’s own behavior has been no surprise at all. As we all know, the United States now has the highest number of confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths from COVID-19 of any country in the world. China is a developing country with about four times the population of the United States, and was the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak, but based on the latest reported numbers, the United States has about eight times the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases and COVID-19 deaths that China has. The United States accounts for less than five percent of the world’s population but about thirty percent of the world’s confirmed COVID-19 cases. Obviously, something has gone terribly wrong in the United States, and I think we all know what that is and who’s responsible.
Here in China, life is slowly getting back to normal, at least where I live. This region of East China around Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Nanjing is the wealthiest and most advanced region in mainland China. It has the highest standards of living, the highest levels of education, the best health care, and the most efficiently-run cities in mainland China. Probably for these reasons the COVID-19 outbreak was not especially bad here. Shanghai, Hangzhou, and other cities went on lockdown immediately when the outbreak started. This was no easy task given the large populations involved — Shanghai’s population is about 24 million and Hangzhou’s about ten million — but it seems to have worked. Since the beginning of the current semester I have been teaching all of my classes online from my apartment. During the lockdown, in addition to deliveries of Chinese food, groceries, and beer, I’ve been able to get food deliveries from Burger King, KFC, Pizza Hut, and a local Mexican restaurant called La Bamba. Activity is beginning to pick up now, and hopefully I can return to normal teaching on campus soon. In the United States as far as I can tell from the news, however, it has only gotten worse, with no end in sight.
Returning to Nixon: Most of the courses I teach here are courses in Western culture and society for Chinese students majoring in English (My degrees are in Humanities and Social Sciences, not TEFL or TESOL). Among the courses I teach is American Social History. In that course I spend two class days on the Nixon presidency, focusing particularly on the 1972 China trip and the Watergate scandal. This follows several class days on the era of the 1960s including the war in Vietnam and the 1968 election. Nixon’s itinerary on his visit to China included Shanghai and Hangzhou, and the hotels where he and his entourage stayed and worked out the details of the Shanghai Communiqué with their Chinese counterparts including premier Zhou Enlai are still in operation today. There is a famous photo of President and Mrs. Nixon with Zhou Enlai at a spot I know well beside Hangzhou’s scenic West Lake, meeting a young girl who probably now tells her children or even grandchildren about the experience.
The young girl Nixon met at West Lake would be about my age, and probably still lives somewhere here in Hangzhou. She could be any middle-aged woman I pass on the street each day. Like her, more or less, I was only six years old when Nixon was elected in 1968, but if I had been of voting age I certainly would not have voted for him, again because I never vote for Republicans. My earliest memory of politics is of my liberal parents’ deep dislike of Nixon. From an historical perspective, however, his was an interesting, complex, and consequential presidency in many ways. His 1972 China trip is at least an illustration of a president doing something presidential, even if it has since produced a mixed bag of results. From a psycho-political perspective, Nixon is also a darkly interesting personality.
Trump’s presidency will also be consequential, in ways that are nothing but bad. At the same time, unlike Nixon, there is nothing interesting or complex about Trump. There is only simple-minded egotism, petty self-interest, corruption, sleaze, and incompetence. From media reports, we know pretty clearly how the Bush family feels about Trump. I can’t imagine Nixon liking or respecting him much, either. Even Nixon wasn’t motivated as exclusively by self-interest as Trump, nor was Nixon a blithering idiot as Trump is. I’ve sometimes thought it would be interesting if we could conjure up Nixon’s ghost just to see what he would think of our newest worst president ever.
Coverage of Trump in Chinese news media focuses mostly on foreign policy issues of concern to China. There is relatively little coverage of U.S. domestic politics. Most well-informed Chinese people know from international media, however, that Trump is a loud-mouthed buffoon ill-suited to being the president of anything. At the mention of his name, people usually laugh. Apart from Trump’s trade war with China — which no one I’ve met here seems to be very worried about — there is a general feeling that China stands to gain geopolitically from his incompetence and his grubby, businessman’s attitudes on foreign affairs. In one class discussion a student told me that many people in China hoped Trump would be elected in 2016, because they believed that “by making America weaker he would help make China stronger.” Chinese leaders are also pleased at his lack of interest in human rights issues or Asian regional issues such as Taiwan and China’s build-up in the South China Sea. Additionally, they like the fact they can often get what they want by flattering him or providing him and his kids with Chinese business opportunities.
Most Chinese people have no hostility toward the American nation, the American people, or American culture — In fact, they rather like us quite a lot. Not once in all my years in China have I encountered personal hostility for being an American or for being a white foreigner. American popular culture is very popular in China, especially among young people like the students I teach. They do understand, however, that the United States and China are geopolitical rivals, and Chinese people can be as nationalistic as anyone else on the planet. They love their country just as we love ours, and can be as enlightened or as unenlightened as Americans can be in their definitions of what “love of country” means. While Barack Obama’s youthful idealism made him a rock star among young people like my students in China, Trump’s grubby transactionalism has made him a lot more popular than Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or Joe Biden among the old men in Beijing. Like those in the Kremlin, the old men in Beijing have every reason to root for Trump’s re-election in 2020, and no reason to welcome a Biden presidency.
Just as the Trump presidency has made criticism of China’s government more difficult, it has also made teaching on American democracy more difficult. When asked by my students here how someone as unpopular as Donald Trump can be elected president without even winning the majority of votes, I have to try to explain why we have an electoral system that makes some people’s votes count a lot more than others, and yet still call ourselves “the greatest democracy on earth.” I have to explain what “voter suppression” and “gerrymandering” and “dark money” are. I have to explain that now it has apparently become okay for certain other countries to help us decide who our president is going to be. Then I have to explain again why we still call ourselves "the greatest democracy on earth."
Now I also have to explain why the U.S. president and his political allies are calling COVID-19 a “Chinese virus” caused by a “culture where people eat bats and snakes and dogs.” Remarks like this, by a president "looking for someone to blame for his administration's belated and sloppy response to the pandemic," have not gone unnoticed in China.
Having compared Trump with Richard Nixon and George W. Bush, he also bears comparing with Chinese president Xi Jinping. By Western democratic standards, Xi is a dictator, and has consolidated more power into his hands than any Chinese leader since Mao. He does not, however, seem motivated exclusively by self-interest. He does seem to understand that he is the president of a country, and that this position carries responsibilities to people other than himself. Unlike Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin, I wouldn’t describe Xi as a simple thug. Unlike Donald Trump, Xi is also not an idiot. Unlike Trump, furthermore, he has not used the COVID-19 crisis as an excuse to go on TV and brag about himself.
In a country like China, unconstrained by the constitutional limits on presidential power that we have in the United States — and unconstrained by the need to be re-elected — Trump would be an even worse nightmare than he is for Americans. Given the kind of power China’s leaders have, there’s no telling what horrors he might unleash. Someone like Trump could never become the president of China, however, because the Chinese Communist Party does at least expect its leaders to have the basic qualifications for the job. In China he would never be anything more than a corrupt businessman and lowbrow celebrity: A tuhao (“uncouth rich”), as the Chinese call someone like Trump who has a lot of money but no class.
Fortunately the United States does have elections, so hopefully in our November 2020 election we can rid ourselves of his uncouth presence. Election Day will come in the middle of my fall semester here, and that Tuesday night as polls close across America, it will be Wednesday morning for me here in Hangzhou. I will therefore be voting by absentee ballot and watching the results come in online, either in my apartment or with my students on campus. Hopefully that will be a night on one side of the Pacific, and a morning on the other side of the Pacific, when America’s many redeeming qualities can once again become clear for all of us to see on both sides of the Pacific.