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.