A different view on current affairs & history
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PE of Yore Volume 1 Defying the Odds – Limited stock
Being a Settler in an undeveloped land with unfriendly neighbours to their east, non-existent infrastructure and a paucity of work opportunities apart from farming their land, would they not only survive but thrive? Ultimately not being unscrupulous opportunists but the opposite, hard working entrepreneurs, the Reed family would rise to the challenge and thrive.
Sailing to a new homeland
Aboard the Chapman, the first ship in the 1820 Settler Armada to arrive at Port Elizabeth, was the Reed family. Previously known as the Sybilla, the 558 ton ship would faithfully serve the British Empire for many more years. But now it was transporting settlers from Cork to Algoa Bay as Port Elizabeth did not yet exist. Ultimately approximately 33 years later it would be lost in the North Atlantic during a voyage from Quebec in the early 1850s.
Shipboard romance
It was the roving eye of the ship’s captain, John Milbank, that was attracted to the young slip of a female, Sara Eliza Reed, the sister to James and Samuel Reed. With the Reed boys being too young at the time, with James being only 7 as he was born in 1813, neither boy would in all likelihood have been aware of the budding romance. Over a voyage of 92 days there was plenty of time for Milbank to woo the 20 year old albeit surreptitiously. The romance must have blossomed during the voyage and so, upon arrival in Cape Town, John Milbank proclaimed that the couple would be married within several days. Sarah never disembarked from the ship. Instead she returned with her husband to England.
[LB15]
Whether dared or on their own volition, two young boys would vie to be the first person ashore. One was a 13 year old boy by the name of James Samuel Reed [SC1] and the other was William Collen [SC2]. Whether they were even aware of the others plot to be first ashore, is unknown but two boys would claim this distinction. In the case of the latter, the family claims that William absconded with the ship’s bell. Passed down from generation to generation this assertion and the bell were ultimately passed down the family until today when Mr. JAS Collen is in possession of the bell. Based upon its inconsequential size, the title of Ship’s Bell is probably too grandiose. Downgrading it to galley bell would probably appease skeptics and naysayers. [SC3] As contestants in the game Chinese Whispers can attest, by the fourth retelling of a fact, the accuracy of the detail no longer bears any resemblance to the original message. All facts are subject to distortion.
An example based upon my family history will emphasise the fact. My maternal great great grandfather was George Dix-Peek. At the apex of his career as an architect, he designed the Standard Bank building in Main Street, Port Elizabeth. The remainder of his drawings were of lessor import, originality and importance. Yet despite that fact, one of my cousins claimed that he designed buildings such as the Union Buildings!
Creating a career as hotelier
Nothing is officially known of either of the brothers’ activities for many years except that James’ initial occupation was that of a blacksmith [3]. Next the trail wends its merry way to being hoteliers.
In January 1840 James Samuel Reed opened the Pier Hotel [SC4] in a house located in Jetty Street which later became the Palmerston and ultimately the Campanile Hotel. There was an hotel on this site for 150 years with the original house being considerably extended over the years and becoming known as the “Palmerston”. To cater for the influx of settlers, visitors and businessmen this hotel could no longer be extended. The solution was to demolish the existing hotel and to replace it with a far larger hotel, the “Campanile” which was built in 1934/5.
On the birth of his eldest son William James Reed, Samuel Reed was the manager of the Pier Hotel. Samuel worked at this trade for 10 years. Combined with the butchering trade, his partners were his brothers George and James William.
It was originally the home of Alexander William Tennant before James Samuel Reed converted it into a hotel. It was not Tennant who would hit the jackpot, but James Samuel. In January 1840, he placed an advertisement that he had taken over Tennant’s house near the proposed new jetty envisaged by the Port Elizabeth Jetty Company. In anticipation of this jetty’s construction literally on his doorstep, he had christened his inn and boarding house, “The Pier Hotel”. In fact, at that stage, even the foundation stone had not been laid yet. Even though the jetty was only finally completed in 1842, using the wreck of the ship Feejee as a base, the expected goldmine had barely commenced production when misfortune befell the jetty. Within five months after officially coming into operation, on Saturday night, 26th August 1843, Port Elizabeth experienced a violent gale, the worst south-easter since 1835. In a matter of hours, three ships broke their anchors smashing into the jetty and utterly destroying it.
James Reed arrived as an 1820 Settler on the Chapman aged seven. In 1846 Tennant was declared insolvent and at the same time Reed announced that he had returned to his earlier trade as a blacksmith.
Together with chartering vessels taking stock, horses and bullocks to Mauritius in exchange for their products principally being sugar, they did very well financially. Samuel’s brother, George, was the buyer of livestock and William was the bookkeeper. That meant that when the chartered boat was loaded, Samuel had to remove his apron and sail to Mauritius. As part of this job was an extremely difficult portion. This entailed catching wild oxen and loading them on board the ship using slings.
In 1849 James William was listed as cabinet makers in Queens Street.
Trying their hand at auctioneering
The family dissolved the partnership, and Samuel started auctioneering. By 1861 he had sold all what were called the Hospital Lands. These properties lay between Bird and Pearson Streets and in the western portion encompassed the first substantial hospital in the town. These lands had been granted by Sir George Grey in 1858 to the town with the intention of selling them to provide funds for the erection of the hospital on Richmond Hill.
The Reed family operates a pont
Prior to the opening of the Mackay Bridge on the Sunday’s River in 1895, passengers and vehicles were taken across the river by means of a pont. J.S. Reed held the lease from 1859 to 1869. James Reed then purchased The Sunday’s River Punt property from Capper for £4750 and Thornhill for £3500. [There are two Thornhills; the farm settled by Christopher near Bathurst in 1820 and the village of Thornhill just beyond the Van Staden’s Pass, named after Christhopher, son of Christopher] After occupying the Punt Property for 10 years, the Uitenhage Council sued Samuel Reed to deliver up the right of way and remove his Punt. He duly refused to relinquish what he had legally acquired from Thomas Capper (b 1811) son of Thomas Capper senior, of George Smith’s party. The case was heard in the Supreme Court. When Reed lost the case, Capper was already dead, and he had no redress which caused him to surrender the property. His son William J Reed then made an offer with the principal creditor W R Metelerkamp through Mr. J S Kirkwood. [James Somers Kirkwood (d.1888) had arrived in Port Elizabeth in 1855 and was a well-known auctioneer and was elected as Town Councillor in 1860 and M.L.A. from 1876 to 1880] had to pay an amount and Reed’s estate was released from Insolvency.
To settle the debt, their property across the Baakens River bridge was sold and realized £600 which was ample to pay the debt. ·
Property magnet
Besides being extremely successful in his occupations as farmer, butcher and auctioneer, James Reed also amassed a great deal of property including farms. [SC5] By 1849, J.S. Reed had acquired half of the farm Nooitgedacht on which Frame’s Drift is located. He eventually played a role in the political management of the town by being elected as Councillor onto the first Town Council and later he was also appointed onto the board of the Divisional Council.
Over the years James Reed was involved in numerous successful and unsuccessful business ventures and amassed a great deal of property.
Fox hunting [LB 14]
One of the British customs which our stubbornly traditional forefathers attempted to import into Port Elizabeth was fox hunting. They had the horses, the hounds, the “pink” which implies or signifies perfect health and happiness. The Eastern Cape offered splendid hunting country but no foxes! As an alternative they resorted to “running duikers or oribi to earth.”
The Herald [EPH 1] described “the “run” of ·the previous Saturday. The hounds were under the charge of Messrs. Ted and George Reed and they usually met at Harries Kraal at 6 a.m. twice a week. There were 5 couples of hounds and they had a particularly good run that day covering 15 to 20 miles before killing within sight of the Kragga Kamma lands.
Sources
[SC1] Social Chronicle to the end of 1945. Harradine Page 275
[SC2] Blog: https://thecasualobserver.co.za/port-elizabeth-yore-settler-ship-chapman/
[SC3] S.C. page 275.
[SC4] SC page 27
[SC5] SC Page 21
[LB14] Looking Back Vol VII No. 1, March 1966 Page 14, Fox hunting]
[EPH 1] E.P. Herald 24 October 1862 Fox Hunting
[LB15] Looking Back Vol XVI No. 3, Sept 1976 Page 84]
[LB] Looking Back Settler Memories by William & James Samuel Reed. Volume 20 No. 1 March 1980 Page 18 to 26
| Name | DoB & DoD | Comment |
| George S. Reed | B. 1818 | Youngest of W. Reed’s 5 children |
| William James Reed | 1840-c1920 | Son of James Samuel Reed, 22 Queen Street |
| James Samuel Reed | 1811-1902 | Grandson of James Samuel Reed |
| William Reed | 1774-1827 | 1820 Settler, John Baillie’s party. Arrived with wife & 5 children aboard Chapman. |
The chronicle of Stanley Bergman’s life transcends the abyss of Nazi Germany, apartheid South End tonwardvo Wall Street in the USA. Survival under the former circumstances depends upon lavish doses of mental fortitude supplemented by moral clarity. As Stanley was only born in Port Elizabeth, he never had to endure the intemperate bully-like behaviour of the Hitlerite regime. Being personally fascinated about people who not only survive such trauma but rise above it, I was compelled to create a blog about Stanley Bergman.
To acknowledge his success in business, and to highlight the man, I was on the horns of a dilemma. Stanley did nor readily cast a light on the past but instead focused on his post Port Elizabeth experiences. As the focus of the series Port Elizabeth of Yore is on a town prior to 1960 yet still wanting to shine a light of his post apartheid life, I was compelled to create a new series Gqeberha of Today. This blog is largely an attribute to his business life using the July 2026 copy of BusinesTech as its concrete slab.
BusinessTech summarises Stanley’s accomplishments as follows: South African man leaves with R900 million after building a Fortune 500 company in the United States. That heading did not attract my attention. No mass firings of synapses occurred. But what had intrigued me were the words born in South End. Clearly an anomaly, an oddity. Questions sparked questions and speculation. What was life like? How extensive was apartheid? Synapses fired in excitation.
Life as a businessman
South African-born Stanley Bergman has been the longest-serving CEO of Henry Schein in the United States, a company that is now worth over $9.6 billion (R160.6 billion).He is credited with being the driving force behind the company’s success and has left the CEO role with over R900 million in company shares for his service.
Life in Port Elizabeth
Bergman was born in Port Elizabeth (now Gqeberha) in 1950 to Jewish parents who had fled Nazi Germany in 1936.He grew up in South End, which was a working-class neighbourhood that he later described as a “totally functional multicultural environment”. His childhood was shaped by apartheid. Although he was raised in a home where racism was openly rejected, he attended a segregated school and watched as the government declared South End a whites-only area in 1963. This forced families from different racial groups to leave before much of the suburb was demolished.
Post P.E.
After school, Bergman studied at the University of the Witwatersrand, earning a Bachelor of Commerce degree in 1972 and a Certificate in the Theory of Accounting in 1973. After this, he and his wife, Marion, a doctor who had worked in Soweto, moved to London, then settled in New York a year later, when Bergman was 26.
His career at Henry Schein began in 1980 when he joined the New York-based dental supplier as chief financial officer. Bergman has said he was drawn to the company because of its values rather than its size. “They had a belief in aligning business with social value. They’d work shoulder to shoulder with their people, and they did a lot in philanthropy,” he said of the founding Schein family.
In 1989, Bergman became chairman and CEO of what was then a regional dental supplier generating $225 million in annual revenue. Over the next three and a half decades, he oversaw a massive period of growth. Henry Schein expanded into a global distributor of dental and medical products, technology and healthcare services.
The company now operates in 33 countries and territories, offers more than 300,000 products through its distribution network, and recorded sales of $12.7 billion in 2024.
It is also ranked No. 333 on the Fortune 500 list. During Bergman’s tenure, annual revenue grew from $225 million (R3.7 billion) in 1989 to almost $13 billion (R217 billion) in 2024, while the company’s market value increased from $290 million (R4.8 billion) at its 1995 stock market listing to around $9.6 billion (R160 billion). Henry Schein said Bergman also helped transform the business from a primarily US-based mail-order dental supplier into a global giant in dental distribution, medical supplies, healthcare software and digital services.
In July 2025, the company announced that Bergman would retire as CEO at the end of the year after 45 years with the business, including more than 35 years as chief executive. “With the progress made advancing our BOLD+1 strategic plan and with strong management in place, it is the right time for me to retire at the end of the year,” Bergman said.
“Henry Schein has been my professional home for 45 years, and I will conclude this chapter of my life with enormous gratitude for the opportunity to serve as CEO and with great confidence in the company’s future.”Lead director Philip Laskawy praised Bergman’s leadership. “Under Stan’s leadership, Henry Schein has become the global leader in providing dental and medical products and solutions for healthcare providers,” he said. “We owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Stan for his steadfast devotion to Henry Schein.”
Reflecting on his career, Bergman has often credited his upbringing in South Africa for shaping his leadership philosophy. “Success is all about caring about people. I learned from my late mother growing up in Port Elizabeth that if you treat people how you want to be treated, things work out,” he said. “And from my late father, I learned to always look for the good in people and be optimistic.” Although he has retired as CEO, Bergman remains chairman of Henry Schein and owns about 646,847 company shares worth more than $55 million, or roughly R906 million. He and his wife have also maintained close ties with South Africa through education, healthcare and charitable initiatives, including support for Wits University and programmes that expanded opportunities for healthcare students across Africa.
Source: BusinessTech July 2026
On Sunday, 19 August, Infantino the Terrible awarded Trump his last ball and gave him a golden shower which took Trump back to the heady days of 2013.
For those who don’t know the context, the Roger Steele intelligence report of 2017 reported that during Trump’s visit to the Miss World pageant in Moscow in early November 2013, he arranged for prostitutes to perform a golden shower routine on the bed that Barack and Michelle Obama used during their visit to Moscow years before. For those of you who don’t know what a golden shower is, SMAC’s lips are sealed – that’s what Google’s for.
This, of course, was delicious and salacious and any other kind of -cious kompromat (Russian term for compromising material useful for bribing) and fed the story of Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential elections. Trump, as is his wont, denies it and goes so far as to say that he wasn’t even there. The latter is a proven lie and as James Comey, erstwhile FBI Director who investigated Trump, points out that when someone lies about one thing in an investigation, all bets are off concerning his credibility, not that it’s ever worried Trump before – it’s his standard operating procedure and he probably secretly gets off on it. Trump just says they’re tall stories after all Comey is 6’ 8” (2.03m for advanced nations) and throws shade on Trump.
Some more context to the photos: No Trump rally would be complete without a “Sir, . . .” or a “Daddy, . . .” story. Now those are truly tall stories, just like Trump’s claimed current height of 1.91m (6’ 3” for backward Americans).
With shades of Einstein’s relativity of time and distance dilation at high speeds, what relevance does this seemingly illogical question relating time and distance have to the Port Elizabeth of Yore blog. Patience dear reader, all will be revealed.
Robert Jacob Gordon executed many expeditions into the interior of the Cape Colony. Of particular interest to Port Elizabeth is his second expedition when he swung through the Algoa Bay area from the 15 th to the 23 rd of January 1778. He was taken to the wreck site of the Sacramento where those who could not make the trek up to Delagoa Bay were buried. He also produced two huge panoramas encompassing the sweep of Algoa Bay, one from near the mouth of the Coega river and another from a high point in the Kragga Kamma area.
Main picture: Panorama of Algoa Bay in 1778 by Robert Gordon
Continue readingIt is doubtful that Trump reads and, if he does, he definitely doesn’t read for meaning. In fact, he probably considers it demeaning, after all possessing the world’s greatest intellect means that nobody can teach him anything. So, it is quite ironic that he is going to build a huge presidential library.
Ok, ok. A presidential library is more than your bog-standard library. They have become a feature of every president of the United States since Herbert Hoover (31st president, 1929–1933). It’s more like a time capsule of what went down during the tenure, or reign in Trump’s case, of the president with the focus on events surrounding him. Naturally there will be a lot of memorabilia alongside all the documents and records.
For Trump it will be the ultimate brag wall and include such historic pieces such as his fake FIFA Peace Prize and tacky gifts from sycophantic tinpot dictators. It will be a completely immersive experience of life inside Trump’s arsehole. There will be lots of merch like personally signed MAGA* caps and probably a complete box set of his 900 plus rallies.
It is another one of his grifts – it is to be built on 2.6-acre prime waterfront real estate worth $67 million and previously owned by the Miami Dade College. The Board of Trustees of this public institution magnanimously decided to give it back to the state and then, in late September 2025, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis grifted it to Trump’s presidential library foundation.
T4 (Trump, The Tacky TACO) has already teased what his library will look like. A foreplay of the library was presented on the Trump Library Foundation’s website. It is roughly a 50-storey glass building that looks more like an hotel or office block, the upper blocks of which Trump has already teased will so be – another Trump grift in plain sight. Naturally the exterior will prominently feature Trump’s name emblazoned in gold and massive portraits of himself. The ground floor will be given over to a display of military jets and the Qatari grifted Boeing 747 presidential jet. There will be a massive golden ballroom room, a replica Oval Office complete with his tacky gold tat on the walls and finally a massive auditorium with a 5 times life-size golden statue of Trump in a defiant pose.
From small beginnings great libraries grow – maybe.
The books are as fake as their owner, just like the old Texan saying – all hat, but no cattle.
Size matters a lot to Trump. It’s the only metric he’s interested in. Superlatives are his stock trade when talking about himself and, in the negative sense, about others.
So let us put aside the many disastrous issues surrounding his latest pet project – the Lincoln Reflecting Pool. Let’s forget about the no-bid contracts that were issued to ‘great guys’ he knew and that it is running at 7 to 10 times what he originally stated, just like his ballroom; or that the new surface coating is lifting; or that the pool immediately turned Iranian green; or that they tried to spin it that it was blue when it was actually green by taking a photo from such a low angle that it reflected the sky. These have been tediously discussed and lampooned and dissected on many news channels and podcasts. SMAC wishes just to focus on the early impress conference that Trump held on 23 April in the Oval Office to brag about the gargantuan job that only he could undertake.
In that presser, he pulled out a large cardboard poster comparing the pool size to well-known American buildings bearing the headline – OUR POOL IS BIGGER THAN SKYSCRAPERS.
The first problem is he’s comparing rhinos to polar bears. They are completely different beasts. Why not compare their volumes? The One World Trade Center has 130x the volume of the Pool. What about comparing it to the height of the Burj Kalifa in Dubai which is 35 % taller than the pool is long? Then, although he had touted a dark blue paint, a somber contemplative color as befitting the idea of the pool, his poster showed a light blue sparkling pool like his pool at Mar-a-Lago in Florida because Trump likes bright things.
Finally, he just couldn’t resist tweaking its dimensions, after all, this is a big project for a big man. Judging from the scaling of his picture, the pool is 2100-2150 ft long, ~5% more than its actual length. Its width is also about 120% wider than its true relative width.
Capping it all, just to show what a bunch of clowns the chief clown surrounds himself with, the scaling misses out the 500 ft increment.
Finally, he just couldn’t resist tweaking its dimensions, after all, this is a big project for a big man. Judging from the scaling of his picture, the pool is 2100-2150 ft long, ~5% more than its actual length. Its width is also about 120% wider than its true relative width.
Capping it all, just to show what a bunch of clowns the chief clown surrounds himself with, the scaling misses out the 500 ft increment.
He has once again been proven to be as shallow as the Pool (average about 0.5m) and, like his medical examinations that falsely declare his height to be 6’3”, his penchant for showmanship based on lies, exaggerations and spurious information has been bust yet again.
Many people have had a species named after them and it is normally considered an honour. If Trump had known about it, he would have sought that honour as he likes to put his Trump stamp on everything except it would have to be on something dominating like a new species of lion. Well, he got this unsought-for recognition except it was for a micro-moth discovered in California in 2017. Since there is mutual animosity between the state and Trump, it’s a reasonable assumption that the discoverer had a wicked sense of humour.
PS. He also had another unflattering species named after him, the Tetragramma donaldtrumpi – a species of fossil sea urchins. All we need now is a newly discovered version of pond life to be named after him.
(For those of you that can’t figure out a lot of Shakespearean English like me, wherefore means why. And for those who don’t follow Trump too closely, and I don’t recommend it, he leaves a foul smell behind, literally and figuratively)
Trump has a predilection for frantically marking his territory like a junkyard mutt. His whole commercial life has been about branding and selling you stuff or aspirations that you don’t really want or need. We’re talking about Trump Towers, Trump Airlines, Trump Steaks, Trump University and much, much more.
Now that he’s become President again – the first time was just a vainglorious TV reality show called The Apprentice President – he’s taken his grifting and branding to a new level by selling Trump smartphones, Trump UFC Medallions, Trump Stablecoins, . . . – the list is endless. But he’s gone further by redecorating Federal buildings in his trademark trashy gold Arab chic and planning to add monuments in his name.
The Kennedy Center is a prime example of Trump’s egregious behaviour. He decided that he wished to place his Trump Stamp on it. Using his executive powers, he fired the board and replaced them with toadies who then elected him Chairman. On 18 December 2025, the board voted to append his trashy name to that of Kennedy’s. Meanwhile, in the background he had lined up the contractor who prepared the new signage. The next day a contractor, who was locked and loaded, arrived on site and added Trump’s name within a few hours – a preplanned assault to make it fait accompli before anyone could do anything about it. The only thing wrong in Trump’s eyes was that his name was not in gold.
Job done, or so he thought. The popular backlash was immediate and massive. Booked performances pulled out to the extent that Trump closed the Center for ‘renovations’ for two years. One of the planned décor ‘improvements’ was to replace the theatre armrests with cold unyielding marble ones – really! He even showed off samples he had produced.
The judicial blowback took a few months but on 29 May a judge ordered that his name be removed within 14 days.
A typical Muslim salutation is Peace Be Upon You. But they are not going to apply that to Trump anytime soon.
Iran has a Supreme Leader and America has a Supreme Dealer, or so he claims. Trump’s biggest mistake in this deal was committed on day one – he took out the Ayatollah, a direct descendent of Mohammed. As a result, there was never going to be a soft exit option. Iran is going to extract the maximum advantage of any ‘peace’ deal and humiliate Trump along the way irrespective of the pain their country has to suffer. This intransigence, which is not based on dollars and cents, is something that Trump doesn’t understand and hence is incapable of dealing with.
Although largely militarily irrelevant in a conventional military sense, Iran has used a few cheap drones on ships along with a number of strikes on America’s Arab allies to shut down the Straits of Hormuz as well as the whole region. Although Trump has routinely threatened total obliteration, he dares not put boots on the ground. In fact, he’s become a tired toothless old dog who’s just yapping and jumping up and down behind the fence and Iran knows it. He dares not place ships in the Straits apart from the odd quick patrol and the downing of a single F15E aircraft over Iran, with its botched rescue that cost over $500m in aircraft losses, has made Iran a no-fly zone except for cruise missiles and unmanned drones.
The two sticking points for Iran have been control of the Straits and nuclear enrichment to some defined extent – the latter is essentially an Obama deal that Trump tore up in his first term. All the progress in talks that Trump announces almost daily are just mirages and are typical Trump exaggerations and lies in his normal attempt to own the news cycle. In fact, CNN has tabulated that Trump has made 38 false claims about imminent deals/surrender since mid-March. At the slightest pretext Iran snatches the deal off the table and laughs at him while loosing off a few random drones to rile him.
The bully boy, Trump, has met his match in China and a devastating opening salvo was fired in World War XI. There have been prior skirmishes initiated by Trump in his trade war with China and the rest of the world but China kept it’s cool while Trump conducted his in-your-face international ‘diplomacy’ on Truth Social and ad hoc pressers.
Trump has a history of denigrating whole countries and their leaders through social media, via pressers and even face-to-face. In his first term, as one childish example, he kept on getting into handshake powerplay contests with President Macron.
The most egregious was during a White House televised press conference with Zelensky of Ukraine on 28 February 2025. First, a right-wing journalist, Brian Glenn, attacked him for not wearing a suit and tie while JD Vance looked on with a smirk. Very soon Zelensky was attacked by the tag team of Vance and Trump and then kicked out of the White House. Trump has routinely sided with Putin forgetting that the US signed security guarantees when Ukraine gained independence from the USSR (note: it was not part of Russia but the USSR) in return for handing all nuclear weapons to Russia thereby losing one huge bargaining chip.
Ever desperate to be admired as the greatest world leader, he was hoping that he could parlay the state visit into another trophy for his boast wall. It was not to be. Instead, he was humiliated straight from the get-go when he was greeted by a minor flunky and 250 little kids – shots fired. And it was downhill from there. The exquisite denouement came on the final day when they were seated either side of a low table for a televised press event. The cushion of the chair that Trump sat in was significantly lower than Chairman Xi’s high chair while Trump had to sit in the low chair like the man-child that he is.
This was a deliberate snub and showed who was really in charge. Game, set and match to Xi and trump (the lack of capitalization is deliberate – a sign of the times/future) knows it. China would not have done this 10 years ago. Instead of Making America Great Again, all trump has succeeded in doing is to hasten the fall of the America Imperial Empire by a few decades. His natural friends in Europe and Canada shun him and are moving everyday to delink themselves from an unreliable ally who they can’t trust anymore. We see this with Europe withdrawing their gold reserves held in the US, the preference for new fighter aircraft and early warning planes to be European, the withdrawal at government level, initially, from American software suites and cloud services to regain their sovereignty which they ceded to the US slowly over the last few decades. The list goes on.
The move by Xi was minor in the greater scheme of things but it is the canary in the coal mine. We can see why he’s called chairman Xi! While trump raucously threatens total annihilation of Iran, China quietly delivered the total humiliation of America.