The right-wing press is all agog, and if it’s being honest a bit dizzy and disoriented: A man it has been taught—and teaches—to fear and loathe, a man whose very existence is anathema to them, a man who is in more or less open warfare with its second-favorite (maybe third now that Boris Johnson’s in No. 10?) world leader, a man who has turned the seemingly admirable phrase “open society” into a code word for “secret world government” to it, a man who dares to be worth an order of magnitude more than the president, a man who embodies the International Jew it hates, has said something nice, however qualified, about Donald Trump. Worse, he’s playing its racist and nativist tendencies like the collapsing pound, positioning himself to the right of the president on China and warning that our deal-obsessed leader, having shed himself of his uncompromising, war-obsessed National Security Adviser, might not grind the Middle Kingdom to dust. And he’s done it in the pages of its house organ, the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
The greatest—and perhaps only—foreign policy accomplishment of the Trump administration has been the development of a coherent and genuinely bipartisan policy toward Xi Jinping ’s China. The administration rightly declared Beijing a strategic rival and placed Huawei, China’s multinational telecommunications giant, on the Commerce Department’s so-called “entity list” as a national-security threat…. The current situation strongly favors the U.S. However, President Trump may soon undermine his own China policy and cede the advantage to Beijing…. In my view, he wants to arrange a meeting with President Xi Jinping as the 2020 election approaches and make a trade deal with him, and he wants Huawei’s status on the table as one of his bargaining chips.
You can see the dilemma faced by the likes of Fox News and the Washington Examiner, caught as they are between two ironclad principles: that everything George Soros says and believes is wrong, that indeed his whole existence is essentially a crime, and that every rare word of praise uttered by a celebrity, no matter how minor, about the president must be played up as much as possible. As it turns out—and much to the president’s satisfaction, one must imagine, the latter proves the more important standard. As Soros himself says, there’s an election next year.
Will Trump Sell Out the U.S. on Huawei? [WSJ]
Soros calls Trump’s China stance his ‘greatest’ foreign policy achievement, warns on Huawei [Fox News]
George Soros praises Trump’s China policy but urges hard line on Huawei [Washington Examiner]