The Manchurian President

Is Trump On China's Payroll? If So, Impeach Him
By Anders Corr

Wednesday brought a wave of news about Trump’s increasingly cozy relationship with China, including on his indirect financial connections. 

The press digested, uncomfortably, Trump’s claim that “Korea actually used to be a part of China.” 

He repeated that Chinese propaganda to the press after he got it direct from Xi Jinping. 

Also Wednesday, reports revealed that Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire gambling boss with casinos in Macao, China, gave $5 million to Trump’s inaugural committee. 

This is the largest single gift ever given for a U.S. president’s inauguration. 

Journalist Matt Isaacs has asked, “Is dirty money spent by corrupt Chinese officials at Macau casinos flowing into our elections, at least indirectly? ” 

The mix of Chinese money and Trump’s softening on China is worrisome, and if a causal relationship can be proved, Trump should be impeached. 

He isn’t good for the Republican Party, and the Democrats will oblige.
Frames of Xi Jinping, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are display in a photo shop in Beijing on April 17, 2017. 

Trump’s administration is softening on China’s ally North Korea, and according to experts, might accept a freeze on North Korea’s nuclear weapons development, rather than an outright ban. 

That would be no real change, as North Korea’s decades-long pattern of playing the U.S. is oscillation between promises of a freeze, and breaking those promises. 

Trump’s phantom aircraft carrier strike group supposedly steaming toward North Korea didn’t help. 

Since Mar-a-Lago, Trump has had mostly good things to say about China. 

He seems to have forgotten that China is sacking U.S. technology to build its military, and the military of North Korea that now threatens us.
Trump’s offer to give China a good economic deal if China helps with North Korea is a chump deal, and we are the chumps. 

It will not be popular with Republican voters. 

It rewards China for the threat China created. 

Rather, Republicans should hold China responsible for anything North Korea does, including nuclear strikes. 

Trump should demand of China that it start acting responsibly and uphold the international laws to which it, and its allies, are already bound. 

Trump should call China’s bluff. 

No more Mr. Nice Guy. 

Obama tried that, and it failed.
But Trump has become the quintessential Mr. Nice to China. 

He doesn’t seem to notice that countries like the Philippines and Vietnam, since Trump’s election, are getting increasingly authoritarian. 

That President Duterte of the Philippines, whose drug war has been responsible for up to 6,000 extrajudicial killings, likens himself to President Trump, should be a warning signal. 

An impeachment complaint has been filed against Duterte, who is under China’s influence. 

Trump’s fate could be the same.

Trump was sitting pretty at Mar-a-Lago with Xi earlier this month. 

Like Duterte, Trump did not appear to care much about China’s human rights abuse or lack of democracy. 

“Donald Trump’s first meeting with Xi Jinping was all about business,” declared the Economist.
Let’s face it. 

Trump is soft on China. 

Trump denied it on April 18, four days after press reports that he was getting chummy with pro-China business interests, including Boeing. 

But 55 percent of voters in a February poll doubted his honesty. 

The Trump family business connections to China exploded shortly after his election. 

Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, almost sealed a $400 million deal with a Chinese company for investment into a New York property. 

This was mixed with Kushner’s back-channel political deals with China’s Ambassador to the U.S.

After the election, Trump met with Alibaba’s Jack Ma and Henry Kissinger, who has taken a consistently pro-China stand and has served as a liaison between China and international business interests. 

All that business talk seems to have had an effect. 

Trump flip-flopped on calling China a currency manipulator, and on the One-China policy. 

Rex Tillerson’s proposed blockade of China’s militarized South China Sea artificial islands was toned down and now seems forgotten.
To ice the cake, on Wednesday China’s Foreign Ministry jumped to defend China’s speedy granting of trademarks to Ivanka Trump. 

She got them on the day she sat at dinner with Xi. 

Donald Trump, too, got his brands trademarked in China shortly after the election. 

That’s all worth money, and it raises a question. 

Is China trying to put Trump on its payroll, even indirectly? 

If China succeeds, the American people are getting reamed and should fight back hard. 

This includes impeachment.
Sadly, the swamp has come to Washington like never before, and Trump appears to be the blond creature most at home in its increasingly surreal waters. 

It is not a run-of-the-mill, money-green swamp. 

It could be a red tide. 

We need a Constitutional Amendment and a new set of tough laws that will keep money and foreigners out of U.S. politics, before foreigners start running the show. 

This especially applies to Russia and China.
Vice President Mike Pence is a clean Republican who would make a great President, and could get elected for two more terms. 

He could pardon Trump, who would return to cable with better ratings, and more Twitter followers, than ever. 

Except for Xi, that’s a win-win outcome for all.