Josh Rogin - Chaos Under Heaven

Before he joined up with Trump, Ross often had warned against demonizing China, and he had openly disagreed with Trump on issues like Chinese currency manipulation. But after he started helping the campaign, he changed his tune to match Trump’s song. Ross even coauthored a white paper for the campaign on trade with Navarro in September 2016 that argued for tariffs and other strong measures against China.

“Our view is that China’s leaders will quickly understand they are facing strength on the trade issue in Trump rather than the kind of weakness on trade that has characterized the Obama-Clinton years,” they wrote.

Ross’s experience and long, personal friendship with Trump gave him confidence that he had authority to make his own deals with Chinese leaders. But he soon found out the hard way that, in this administration, even Trump’s closest buddies could be the targets of his wrath.

The Humiliation of Wilbur Ross

In April, Trump had launched an investigation that would determine whether the United States could impose steel and aluminum tariffs on national security grounds, under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act. The last time a president invoked that law to impose tariffs was in 1986. The investigation made the tariff threat credible.

As the one hundred days were wrapping up, Ross and Mnuchin planned to unveil a deal with a high-level visiting Chinese government delegation that would have avoided imposing the steel tariffs in exchange for China agreeing to cut its steel exports. Ross had scheduled a news conference on the last day of the Chinese delegation’s visit. There was a celebration dinner scheduled at his house the evening before. There was just one thing they forgot to do.

“The dinner was scheduled. They wanted to announce it the next day,” Bannon said. “But they hadn’t run it by Trump”

Just hours before the dinner, Ross was called into the White House to see Trump. Navarro, who had not been part of the bilateral negotiations, caught wind of the announcement and told Trump about it, making sure to point out its weaknesses.

Trump blew up at Ross when he arrived at the Oval Office in a meeting attended by several other senior staffers. Trump called Ross “weak” and “washed up” and said he “pitied Wilbur’s wife,” according to one official who was in the room. The deal was off, Trump declared.

The president was just as angry at Ross for not consulting him in advance as he was about the details of the arrangement. Trump wanted to make sure everyone knew that he, and only he, could agree to any deal. Just because he gave someone the authority to negotiate, that didn’t mean he would accept whatever they came back with.

Trump’s humiliation of Ross resounded across the administration. The dinner at the commerce secretary’s house went forward, but the deal and the news conference were canceled. Ross never recovered in Trump’s eyes, and the baton for leading the trade negotiations passed to Mnuchin and Robert Lighthizer, who had been confirmed in May as US trade representative. “Wilbur was about to sell us down the river,” a White House official critical of Ross’s gambit said. “But Trump made a call and it was over.”

“We’ve Got to Get the Rapist”

In the months following the Mar-a-Lago summit, Trump’s billionaires tested out his willingness to do personal favors for his new friend Xi, acting as a go-between in the effort to extradite one of the CCP’s most vocal critics from the United States.

Xi and Trump had a lot of personal one-on-one interactions—a stream of communications that would blossom into over thirty letters and forty personal phone calls exchanged between the two leaders. Xi used fhese communications to incept Trump with pro-Beijing ideas, which Trump’s team then had to contend with. But when Xi wanted to cut out the US government officials altogether, he would work through this network of private influencers, especially when he wanted something particularly shady. Trump’s staff often had to scramble to figure out how to contain the damage from these gambits, when they even found out about them at all.

Such was the case on the morning of June 29 at the White House. By pure happenstance, Bannon was in the Oval Office. The president walked in around 10 a.m.; his next appointment was an intelligence briefing about an hour later, and in the interim, Bannon had a list of issues he wanted to raise with Trump. But before Bannon could begin, the president stopped him in his tracks.

“Hang on,” Trump said. “We’ve got to get the rapist.”

“Excuse me?” Bannon said.

“The rapist,” Trump repeated. “We’ve got to get the rapist . . . the guy who’s raping everybody. We’ve got to get him.”

Seeing that Bannon was stupefied, Trump called out to Madeleine Westerhout, his trusted personal secretary, and demanded she bring in a letter Trump had received from his friend, casino magnate Steve Wynn, when the two had met the night before at the Republican National Committee fund-raiser at the Trump International Hotel in DC. This in and of itself was strange: many White House officials hadn’t forgotten that Wynn had trash-talked Trump during the campaign, but the businessman had turned on a dime after the election and become one of Trump’s buddies, a frequent visitor to Mar-a-Lago, and Republican National Committee finance chair. Trump, who often seemed to value personal loyalty above all else, didn’t seem to hold it against him.

Westerhout came into the Oval Office and handed Trump a large envelope. “I want to get this guy out of the country, now,” Trump insisted.

“Mr. President, what are you talking about, what is this letter?” Bannon asked.

“This letter that Wynn brought me from Xi,” the president responded. “It’s a personal favor from Xi.”

Trump seemed to think Wynn was passing on a letter directly from the Chinese government. In fact, that’s how the Wall Street Journal reported it later that year. As far as Trump was concerned, the president of China had sent a secret communication to the president of the United States through a casino owner with huge financial stakes in China. Wynn told Trump Xi wanted him to extradite a Chinese national named Guo Wengui. Also known as Miles Kwok, Guo was a Chinese billionaire who had close links to the Ministry of State Security, particularly senior vice minister Ma Jian, who recently had been purged and charged with accepting bribes from Guo, who fled to the United States shortly before the CCP completed its investigation into Ma. Two years later, Guo claimed to have switched sides and to now be working to expose the corruption of senior CCP officials—including China’s vice president, Wang Qishan.

But it wasn’t actually a letter from Xi. What Wynn had passed Trump was a research file on Guo, compiled by a team of billionaires and alleged criminals who were helping the Chinese government convince Trump to hand over Guo. The material laid out the allegations against Guo and showed Interpol had put out a “red notice” on the Chinese billionaire, seeking his arrest on corruption charges. Wynn was trying to help a foreign government manipulate the US justice system to have a critic of the regime handed over by the US president. Not only was this a brazen breach of US law and all norms of diplomatic interactions, but China also was passing the message through a casino owner its leaders knew they could leverage, who undoubtedly sold it hard to Trump before any US government officials or experts could possibly weigh in. In any normal environment, such a maneuver would never work. But Trump was a willing mark.

Trump didn’t know who Guo was and didn’t seem to care. He was willing to take it on Beijing’s word—as conveyed by Wynn—that this “rapist” was a criminal who needed to be sent back to China to face punishment. (Guo denies these and all other charges brought against him by the Chinese authorities.)