President Donald Trump put on a promiscuous display of fawning extravagance in welcoming the president of the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping, to the White House. The idea, one presumes, was to lavish the Chinese communist dictator with such a sheer volume of official state honor that he would be beguiled into returning the favor in the form of … oh, I don’t know, important trade concessions maybe? Critical minerals access and assurances that they won’t start World War III (Pacific Edition) by invading other countries? Committing to free an aging newspaper publisher from prison and to stop torturing and killing people for going to unauthorized churches?
Assuming that was the goal of the spectacle, how did it work out? Welp, according to an official state communique from the CCP, the grandiose summit generated “eight deliverables.” The most concrete of which was the delivery by China of … two pandas to an Atlanta zoo.
