In this episode of Triggered, journalist Lee Smith is back with us to talk about his new book, The China Matrix, which dives deep into everything we ve been talking about: The fentanyl crisis, the Wuhan lab leak, the Chinese spy ring, trade, espionage, and so much more.
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00:09:56.000Joining me now, author of the new book, The China Matrix, investigative journalist Lee Smith.
00:10:46.000But one of the reasons for that is what his father, Joe Biden, did as president.
00:10:50.000And what that was is Joe Biden made an agreement with the Chinese Communist Party to allow Chinese firms on U.S. capital markets, the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, and others, with no accountability.
00:11:05.000These firms defrauded American investors to the tune of billions and billions of dollars.
00:11:11.000So while we focus rightly on some of the U.S. manufacturers who left the United States, They screwed American middle class, American workers out of jobs and they made a killing in China.
00:11:30.000And so what Joe Biden did, I have to say, that's right at the top is really shocking.
00:11:35.000What are some of the examples of that and what exactly happened?
00:11:39.000Well, I mean, what happened was that the Chinese had been, a lot of different Chinese firms had been listing on U.S. markets and these were fraudulent firms and they just ripped off U.S. investors.
00:11:51.000When investors started to get upset about this, Joe Biden and Xi Jinping, by the way, Xi Jinping, who is now the head of China, the president of China, the general secretary of the Communist Party and the head of the military, he was vice president at the time.
00:12:06.000So he and Joe Biden arranged for a memorandum of understanding that let all these Chinese companies back onto markets without any transparency, no accountability.
00:12:17.000And unlike any other company in the world, Don, American companies have to prove that they're accountable.
00:12:26.000They have to have audits of their accounting and other things, not for the Chinese Communist Party companies.
00:12:32.000So that is one of the reasons why Hunter Biden, a lot of people think that the Biden relationship was just to prime the way in the event that Joe Biden might again come back to government.
00:12:44.000No, it was partly a reward for what Joe Biden had already done to pave the way for all these Chinese companies to, again, defraud American investors.
00:12:54.000And even the real Chinese companies that came on board, they were making billions and billions of dollars.
00:12:59.000As your father, the president, frequently points out, we have funded the Chinese military through our trade deficit with China, going back decades, and through capitalization on U.S. capital markets.
00:13:15.000And also the real big story underneath is just that, how much America has funded not just a challenger or a competitor, not just a rival, but what turns out to be a very serious adversary.
00:13:31.000Do we have any understanding of just how much money Hunter Biden made in some of these transactions?
00:13:37.000I mean, I know it was tens of millions in many cases, but you see more recently he's feigning bankruptcy and the guys that were funding his legal stuff have stopped doing it.
00:13:48.000Obviously, once they weren't in power, they no longer had any interest in preserving those relationships.
00:13:54.000But do we have an understanding of how much this is?
00:13:55.000Because when you talk about stuff like that, I mean, that seems like really big money.
00:14:00.000Well, I mean, it's extremely bad, the fact that he made any money.
00:14:04.000But again, I think a lot of this was a lure.
00:14:06.000A lot of this was rewarding him for what Joe Biden had done in the past.
00:14:11.000And I imagine that, you know, doing business in China is even hard for Hunter Biden, right?
00:14:16.000Because they don't make it easy on Americans.
00:14:18.000This is one of the points of the book.
00:14:20.000And American companies have been warned again and again, you will get taken advantage of.
00:14:25.000They will steal your intellectual property.
00:14:28.000They will force you to transfer technology.
00:14:31.000And this is one of the things that your father has been negotiating with over Xi, dating back to his first term.
00:14:37.000So the fact that Hunter Biden didn't make the hundreds of millions or the billions that he might have hoped to have made in China comes as no surprise.
00:14:47.000Everyone who's greedy and everyone who has big eyes and thinks they're going to do great in China, no Americans have done very well in China.
00:14:54.000It's been an extraordinarily poisonous relationship.
00:14:58.000Yeah, I mean, that's one that, you know, as a 25, 30 business guy, that's like one of the unwritten rules.
00:15:04.000Like basically, if you're not local, you're not winning a lawsuit in China.
00:15:19.000They'll utilize it for whatever else it is.
00:15:22.000It's wild that they got away with it for so long.
00:15:25.000And American companies, again, they've been warned.
00:15:28.000This is one of the remarkable things that I found researching the book, speaking to people who worked for your father in the first term.
00:15:34.000Some of them are back there in the second term, but they said, Look, we warned a lot of these companies: if you go in, here's what's going to happen to you.
00:15:40.000And they say exactly what you said: you're going to have no recourses in the court system.
00:15:45.000There's nothing that you can do about it.
00:15:46.000We can't help you if you, you know, if you lose money and if you get ripped off there, we're warning you now, it's what's going to happen.
00:15:54.000But again, your father is making a bigger play saying this has to stop.
00:15:59.000Basically, the argument your father is making is something that people have known for a long time.
00:16:03.000The reason the Chinese Communist Party is where it is, is one thing, because they've leeched off of the United States, our investment, our manufacturing, our technology.
00:16:14.000The other thing is they've cheated, right?
00:16:16.000Whether it's manipulating currency, whether it's stealing intellectual property, whether it's forced technology transfers, and lots of other things, they cheat.
00:16:43.000As I point out in the book, your father's been writing about the Chinese Communist Party since 2000, his book, The America We Deserve.
00:16:50.000So he wasn't fooled at all about what the Chinese are up to.
00:16:56.000A case that I've made is this is the person we want not just negotiating, not just negotiating with Xi Jinping, but guiding America through this incredibly perilous time and to delink us from this poisonous party.
00:17:12.000So the subtitle of the book is The Epic Story of How Donald Trump Shattered a Deadly Pact.
00:17:18.000What is the pact that you're referring to?
00:17:21.000And what does it mean for what's happening now in the second term?
00:17:27.000The deadly pact is it started 50 years ago.
00:17:30.000The first chapter, again, starts with an interview with your father, and he talks about a lot of people will say about the U.S.-China relationship.
00:17:37.000Well, okay, granted, it's gotten a little bad, certainly since China entered the World Trade Organization.
00:17:43.000But the case that your father makes, and I think is exactly right, it's like, no, this happened in 1972 with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger when they went to China.
00:17:51.000Your father says in the book, he says, you know, a lot of people think that the worst thing Nixon did was Watergate.
00:18:05.000So that's what's been going on for more than half a century.
00:18:08.000And it's not just Democrats like Joe Biden, like Barack Obama, like Bill Clinton, who was the president who ushered China into the World Trade Organization.
00:18:45.000That's what he did this week in South Korea with his meeting with Xi.
00:18:49.000And what I try to explain to people is like, this isn't over by a long shot.
00:18:53.000This lasted throughout President Trump's first term, and this is going to be going on to the second term as well.
00:18:59.000And you have to understand the ups and downs, the negotiating tactics, and the big picture, what the president is looking for.
00:19:07.000So while it's good to see what's happening now, this is going to go through many, many ups and downs.
00:19:15.000And I urge people, some people are confused about stuff like the tariffs.
00:19:20.000One of the things that I explain in the book is how tariffs have been a part of U.S. economic and national security since Alexander Hamilton.
00:19:28.000So when your father says stuff like tariffs, what a beautiful word, the most beautiful word in the English language.
00:19:37.000They're a little worried about what all of this means.
00:19:40.000And so part of what the book is intended to do is to show people what the history of the U.S.-China relationship is like and also what the outcome is likely to look like with your father leading the United States.
00:19:55.000Yeah, because the notion is, I mean, everyone was tariffing us essentially, one way or the other, whether it was explicitly or implicitly.
00:20:06.000They were just preventing it from ever happening.
00:20:08.000So this notion of reciprocal tariffs makes a lot of sense.
00:20:11.000They've been doing it to us, but we always had to be the big schmuck.
00:20:14.000They just, well, they can do it to us and we'll just do it to them.
00:20:16.000And a couple of big corporate juggernauts say, well, I can save two cents on my widget.
00:20:20.000So it doesn't really matter if we basically destroy our middle class, destroy our manufacturing base, and basically create the only export America's really had for the last few decades, which is our American dream.
00:20:36.000It started after, you know, it starts really after World War II, where people have this obsession with what I call a doctrine of free trade.
00:20:44.000Look, fair and free trade is great when it happens, but that's not what China's been doing.
00:20:49.000And other countries have been taking advantage of us for a long time as well.
00:20:53.000Before it was China, it was Japan and it was Germany.
00:21:07.000But then you start to realize once it rolls into China as well, and we're making those same deals with the Communist Party, it's repugnant.
00:21:19.000And so what I try to show as well is I show the effects, the consequences of this.
00:21:24.000What's happened, the financial crisis, the failures of the global war on terror, the housing crisis, all of these different things are offshoots of this terrible relationship with the People's Republic of China.
00:21:38.000And that's what I mean about shattering the deadly pact.
00:21:41.000Your father's the first, there have been other political leaders on the right, like Jesse Helms, on the left, like Dick Gephardt.
00:21:48.000But your father's the first president.
00:21:50.000He says, we have to do something about this or we're going to pay a very steep price for our country.
00:21:56.000Yeah, Lee, I mean, like you talked about a little bit, you trace it all the way back to Kissinger and Mao, actually.
00:22:02.000I mean, how did we go from fighting communism in Vietnam to essentially funding and building up the Chinese Communist Party?
00:22:11.000You know, when did American elites decide that selling out American workers was worth it?
00:22:15.000I mean, it seems like a gradual buildup, but perhaps, you know, was there a particular thing that just started it and then it just kept going because they were greedy?
00:22:22.000I mean, I'll give Kissinger a little bit of credit.
00:22:25.000He was, you know, coming out of World War II and he saw the world in a different way.
00:22:29.000He believed in, you know, he believed in a balance of power.
00:22:34.000One of the things that a lot of people don't know about, there's a transcript of that first meeting with Mao and Nixon and Kissinger and Zhou.
00:22:43.000And it's just terrible to read the transcript of that conversation.
00:22:48.000American statesman, the American president and his chief national security advisor, abasing himself to this communist tyrant who is responsible for tens of millions of deaths of his own people.
00:23:05.000And very few people bear down and say, what does this actually mean?
00:23:08.000not just for us in terms of trade and not just in terms of national security, but what does it mean for the prestige and the fabric of our constitutional republic to be tying ourselves so closely to this disgusting, tyrannical, barbaric regime?
00:23:48.000And the degradation, the degradation of America, again, it's not just how much the middle class was hurt, how much we lost our manufacturing base, which is supposed to be like one of the tests of any country's prestige.
00:24:15.000So that's why it's so important when your father celebrates people like Tim Cook at the joint session of Congress in February saying, yes, Apple's moving some facilities back here.
00:24:26.000He's trying to get Americans back to the United States and make things here for Americans.
00:24:34.000And again, I've certainly been critical of a lot of big tech and a lot of that, but to start bringing some of that understanding that it's not all going to happen overnight, but even just to be able to start breaking those supply chains where we can't be dependent on them, where there was the rare earth mineral issue, whether it's basically all of tech, whether it's our chips being manufactured solely in Taiwan, which is a great ally, but it's also 68 miles from China and not the easiest thing to defend.
00:25:00.000It feels like the policies are working that these big guys that have for years taken advantage of the cheap labor and in fact very skilled labor there, while our guys stopped learning those skills and started getting gender studies degrees, those kids were learning science and manufacturing and building and getting real income and experiencing a little bit of taste again of our American dream.
00:25:22.000What I want most from this is not just a decoupling from China, but I want sort of a restoration of American pride, whether it's workmanship, whether it's workmanship or making things, because that's what Elsa manufacturing base does.
00:25:46.000So what is America famous for building?
00:25:49.000And we've built great and wonderful things.
00:25:52.000The innovation and the invention of this country is amazing.
00:25:55.000So I want people to, especially younger men, we see a lot of them despondent about their, about not just about their futures, but about how they're being cheated out of the American dream by garbage like DEI.
00:26:15.000And I believe that that is an important part of your father's efforts against China to making America great again is also making people believe in the country and believing themselves.
00:26:44.000Especially when you have our bureaucrats and policies, it takes you three years to be able to get the environmental impact statement done to be able to build a plant on sand.
00:26:52.000I mean, it's a little bit nuts, but it does seem like it's starting to work.
00:26:56.000And that's going to pay long-term benefits to our workers, to our citizens into the future, and help break us from that stranglehold that they have on us on our critical manufacturing.
00:27:06.000I think one of the big things is your father, you know, he's got a great team doing China stuff.
00:27:12.000He's got a great team in the White House.
00:27:14.000I think if there's some way also to make sure that Americans understand what he's doing, because when people talk about China playing the long game, all they're talking about is what you're saying, that, you know, we want instant gratification in the United States and we elect a new leader every four years.
00:27:29.000I think it's very important that people understand that this is crucial, crucial to our freedom, crucial to the existence of the, you know, to the existence of our constitutional republic.
00:27:41.000So this stuff cannot go away after, you know, after January 20, 2029.
00:28:38.000I mean, you know, but it's hard because I get it.
00:28:41.000You know, people can struggle in certain industries in certain places, but like none of these things can happen overnight.
00:28:47.000And we've gotten so accustomed to that.
00:28:48.000I think our electorate works that way.
00:28:50.000When they make a lot of bad promises to get elected in two weeks, then we got to live with the bad ideas, the bad policy for the next 50 years.
00:28:58.000And it just compounds and gets worse and it gets worse and it gets worse.
00:29:01.000And then you end up in a place like we are today.
00:29:03.000I think that your father must be walking a pretty fine line.
00:29:08.000I think he wants Americans to understand exactly this.
00:29:11.000He wants people to understand: look, this is tough.
00:29:14.000Xi's a tough negotiator, and this is really for the future of America.
00:29:19.000And on the other hand, as a negotiator, as someone who has to be tough, he can't give everything away.
00:29:26.000I've heard him talk about this before in all sorts of situations.
00:29:56.000There will be more threats of tariffs.
00:29:57.000I think that G will again threaten to go nuclear on the rare earth stuff.
00:30:02.000So it's a very difficult, delicate game.
00:30:05.000But in addition to what your father knew going into his first term, what he learned about G, what he learned about G, what he learned about G in the first term is amazing.
00:30:14.000And I think it's actually already having lots of effects.
00:30:17.000We saw just a couple of weeks ago how there's been some upheavals in the People's Liberation Army.
00:30:23.000I believe it was nine senior officials who were let go.
00:30:27.000And we don't know exactly the story behind that, but that shows instability.
00:30:34.000So that tells me, again, that the pressure coming from the White House, coming from this administration, is having some very serious effect on what's going on in Beijing.
00:30:43.000Lee, you write that my father, quote, shattered the illusion of a benign China.
00:30:49.000Can you expand on that a bit and then also maybe explain it in the context of the recent meeting with Xi?
00:30:56.000Because every president before him, Joe Biden most famously said, hey, folks, they're not bad and they're not going to eat our lunch.
00:31:04.000Every president before him, even Ronald Reagan, right, were talking about, they talked about how important the rise of China was to America's future.
00:31:14.000No, bringing the Communist Party of China into the global system, into the international trade regime, was a terrible thing for the United States.
00:31:23.000It was a terrible thing for the world.
00:31:25.000So again, it's just astonishing if you go back and I chart the history of what all these different presidents have said, how all these different administrations handled China and talked about China, and it was just a disaster.
00:31:37.000And they acted like that too, as though China was an honest broker.
00:31:41.000And finally, your father comes along and says, no, it's not.
00:31:44.000Look at the different things they're doing.
00:31:45.000Other people have talked about how the Chinese manipulate currency, but I have to do something about it.
00:31:50.000You know, that's another important thing that your father says in the interview.
00:31:53.000He said, you know, he said, I'm the only one who's ever done anything about it.
00:31:58.000Everyone else, whether they believed it or whether they just had to say it for their own donor base that they believed in a beneficent China, your father's the one who finally called them out.
00:32:13.000And that in itself is pressure, saying, I know what you're doing.
00:32:20.000Yeah, I mean, are there still people, even on the conservative side, that believe that they're acting in good faith, that China is actually not just trying to be the world's dominant force?
00:32:27.000Why would we see the hegemony that we've had with these bad policies for so long there?
00:32:32.000I mean, I can't imagine anyone, even with a straight face, and even if you're doing it to satisfy a donor base or something like that, actually believing it and continuing and perpetuating these policies that have clearly been disastrous for America, for our jobs, for our wages across the board.
00:32:49.000I mean, they pay people, of course, but there's something else as well, because so many American businesses want to get into China and some of them do get into China.
00:32:59.000The deal that Kissinger was the one who initiated this.
00:33:04.000The American companies, they get into China.
00:33:07.000Now, they might not be able to do much business in the Chinese market, but they'll go there and they'll manufacture.
00:33:11.000And that's where they make their killing.
00:33:13.000Manufacturing in China and exporting back to the United States.
00:33:16.000But the only companies that are allowed into China are the ones big enough or vocal enough that can project power, not just in Washington, but in state governments as well.
00:33:26.000So all of these different companies, American companies that do business in China, they come back and they put pressure on national figures, whether it's senators, congressmen, as well as local figures, local legislatures.
00:33:45.000And finally, there are some states that have said, I believe it was Texas, who said, yeah, we cannot afford to have the Chinese Communist Party buying any more Texas land, certainly not near sensitive military facilities and other places.
00:34:00.000Yeah, it's always like food, supply chain, medicine, supply chain.
00:34:04.000I mean, it's very clear, clearly a power play to be able to cut us off from the critical necessities of life in America.
00:34:12.000And that people don't see that or wouldn't want to try to stop it is either incredibly stupid or incredibly malicious, and perhaps both.
00:34:21.000I mean, weirdly, it's not hard to believe.
00:34:30.000I have to say, a lot of stuff on the left is actually quite malevolent.
00:34:34.000I'm not justifying what the Republican bad guys have done in this case, but when we see the left, when we see the different things that, for instance, Dianne Feinstein, there's a long chapter on Dianne Feinstein and her husband.
00:35:43.000Are we basically training China's military intelligence apparatus in our own schools and then also bringing them over here to be professors?
00:35:55.000I mean, I have a long section in there on the book, in the book, The China Matrix.
00:36:00.000You know, there's something about, I mean, Harvard's one of the worst.
00:36:04.000They arrested the head of, I believe it was the chemistry department, Charles Lieber.
00:36:08.000And this guy had been working for a Chinese spying program for years, taking money.
00:36:14.000He was also working in China itself, just amazing.
00:36:17.000Look, a lot of people got very concerned when your father was talking about, oh, I don't mind having 600,000 Chinese graduate students here.
00:36:26.000Well, I know that's not right because there are people who worked for your father in the first term.
00:36:31.000They were saying, no, the president, when he found out how many Chinese graduate students were here and how some of them were working in very sensitive research facilities like our nuclear labs, he was furious about it.
00:36:44.000And so I expect that in the second term that he is going to do something about it.
00:36:49.000When he said that about the 600,000 students, I interpreted that as I see a lot of the things that he says.
00:36:56.000It's part of a messaging campaign to Xi and to the Chinese Communist Party, and it's part of a negotiating tactic.
00:37:04.000And I try again when I hear that sort of stuff and when I talk to people, say, I wouldn't worry about it.
00:37:10.000President Trump is hugely informed about what's going on in this country, about the Chinese infiltration, the problems with China.
00:37:43.000It's a larger, a larger, how do we put it, confederation of things that your father is concerned about.
00:37:51.000These are all part of the bigger China problem.
00:37:55.000Yeah, I mean, some of the biotech theft, I mean, some of the stuff they're studying, I mean, it's basically like, let's educate the people and let them be the leads in research in what could be the next Wuhan virus.
00:38:07.000And then I'm sure they're going to be honest brokers, even though we had ones a couple of months ago getting caught smuggling some of that sensitive data back and forth and into America.
00:38:38.000I mean, when we're talking about the STEM subjects, right?
00:38:44.000The STEM subjects, they don't care because, as you say, it's full tuition.
00:38:48.000And of course, the people who are coming are either either families of regime figures or they're being paid for by the regime.
00:38:57.000So this is all money that's being transferred directly, directly from the regime into universities.
00:39:03.000But remember the people who are often the heads of these universities, oftentimes these are leftists.
00:39:07.000And I have a long chapter in my book on the relationship between American leftists and the Chinese Communist Party.
00:39:15.000And so that's an enormous deal as well.
00:39:17.000That this is for a long time, the university, for decades now, the university has been a hotbed of pro-China activism.
00:39:26.000And so where they had these different, you know, the Confucius Institutes as well.
00:39:30.000I mean, these were basically outposts for Chinese intelligence.
00:39:33.000So we have a lot of people, a lot of people throughout the American elite, whether this is the media, whether this is the academy, whether this is the corporate sphere, tech, all these other things who are some of them, yeah, some of them, it's just not money.
00:39:50.000Some of them are awfully sympathetic to the goals of China.
00:41:00.000Yeah, I mean, you connect it directly to the China Matrix.
00:41:03.000I mean, this is literally chemical warfare that's going on.
00:41:07.000I mean, is this a major part of why perhaps my father is prioritizing our own hemisphere for a change rather than having seeded our own backyard while fighting wars in far off lands and places that don't share our values or that we even care about or have no national interest in?
00:41:23.000And this is part of closing the border.
00:41:26.000It's not just closing it to dangerous people.
00:41:28.000And a lot of bad actors from China have come, but it's also fentanyl.
00:41:34.000I mean, it's bad enough with the cocaine.
00:41:36.000It's bad enough with other things that are coming across the border.
00:41:39.000But I mean, a lot of this fentanyl is being snuck into stuff.
00:41:42.000I mean, we see all the terrible stories all the time.
00:41:44.000And your father talks about it, but these young kids who think they're ordering something, they think they're ordering something to help keep them up at night, studying for exams, right?
00:41:53.000And it turns out to be laced with fentanyl and they die.
00:42:00.000But yes, absolutely, this is part of China's war against the United States.
00:42:04.000And you looked, I mean, they run countless demoralization campaigns.
00:42:08.000If you see what happens on social media as well, they're doing it there.
00:42:12.000So the purpose is really to attack the fabric of the United States to destroy and to divide this country.
00:42:21.000And that's been going on for a very long time.
00:42:23.000Again, this is in my chapter about how the left, starting with groups like the Black Panthers, have been collaborating, coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party.
00:42:35.000Yeah, I mean, it also seems like they're a big part of the people pushing some of the civil unrest issues, you know, really adding a lot of fuel to the fire.
00:42:44.000I think they're the ones also pushing a lot of the trans nonsense, trying to just demoralize and indoctrinate our children into this insanity.
00:42:52.000I mean, that's clearly coming from them too, isn't it?
00:43:13.000They push a whole bunch of different narratives into our information ecosystem, you know, insane lies.
00:43:19.000And most of us, many of us are learning how to recognize these bad things right now.
00:43:25.000But it's all part of what people call China's unrestricted warfare against the United States.
00:43:31.000So they're doing it in every possible way.
00:43:34.000One of the arguments I make is that your father is focused on trade.
00:43:38.000He's focused on the trade deficit because that's how China can afford to do lots of these different things.
00:43:44.000So when people are worried about Taiwan, as this administration definitely is, and we urge the Taiwanese to spend more on their defense, and they've boosted their defense for 2026, they'll be spending more than $30 billion.
00:43:59.000But that's a tenth of what China's trade surplus with us is like.
00:44:05.000There's no way that Taiwan can keep up with this.
00:44:08.000Yeah, we're paying for their military industrialization.
00:44:39.000That's why the trade war is so important for your father.
00:44:42.000But the way I understand it is the trade war, what people are calling the trade war is part of a much larger conflict that your father understands, unlike few people, unlike no one before him, and unlike few people now.
00:44:57.000Leon, I'm kind of curious, you know, where does the China story start for you?
00:45:01.000What motivated you to cover this so extensively?
00:46:00.000So really, that's what got me interested in it.
00:46:02.000And I know that's true with a lot of other people too.
00:46:05.000A lot of other people, Republicans, and there are some Democrats as well, people on the left as well, who are upset by this relationship.
00:46:12.000But it was really your father as president who highlighted this and said, this is a threat to us.
00:46:20.000On that same note, Lee, what are some of the common themes or perhaps overlapping ideas between your work in the plot against the president and this book?
00:46:30.000Are there common threads or parallels there?
00:46:32.000Well, I mean, one of the things that I realized, one of the things that I realized partly through interviewing your father, I started to see Russia Gate actually as a plot not just to undo your father and to cripple his administration, his first administration, but also as an effort to cover for China, right?
00:46:53.000You had all these different people who are coming together and part of it is their madness, their insanity.
00:46:57.000But once I started seeing who was attacking him, right, from the different industries, from the different places, and it wasn't just the political left.
00:47:06.000There were lots of other people involved as well, media, culture, everyone who has a stake, whose power, whose wealth and prestige is staked to the Chinese Communist Party.
00:47:17.000I'm like, of course, that's a large part of the purpose of RussiaGate, to keep President Donald Trump off his toes so he can't focus on China.
00:47:28.000And your father relays a time when he was speaking to Vladimir Putin.
00:47:34.000And President Trump says, you know, it would have been too bad because it would have been interesting to have explored a relationship to see if we could do anything with Putin.
00:47:44.000But of course, we couldn't because of RussiaGate.
00:47:46.000So Russagate did tremendous damage to American national security.
00:47:51.000And I remember that was one of the things your father told me too.
00:48:42.000Not many people are more motivated to get that.
00:48:43.000Certainly not in government bureaucracies.
00:48:47.000But that was definitely a way to distract him from being able to accomplish more in his first term.
00:48:52.000It is amazing, though, when I think about it.
00:48:54.000When I think about RussiaGate, the madness, and I wrote the plot against the president and then the permanent coup and then disappearing the president, all about RussiaGate.
00:49:01.000When I think about like how much RussiaGate, the madness and insanity of it, and then I realize that during that entire time, your father is also fighting this conflict against the People's Republic of China, an enormous trade war, tariffs, all these other things.
00:49:16.000Like, how did he manage to do this at all?
00:49:20.000And he had a very good China team, a lot of people who did very good work on China.
00:49:25.000So that team helped people like Bob Lighthizer.
00:49:31.000They were all extremely talented people.
00:49:33.000But again, just thinking, wow, they really tried to block him from China, but he was able to still get a tremendous amount of stuff done on that.
00:49:41.000So Lou, in your opinion, what are the benchmarks for U.S. success with China?
00:49:46.000You know, when we look back decades from now, what will be the signs of winning?
00:49:51.000Yeah, I think a lot of it will have to do with, I think a lot of it will have to do with restoring American manufacturing, as I said before, and who's coming back.
00:50:06.000Some of these jobs, some of them will not be jobs.
00:50:09.000Some of them will be done by automation, but those are still going to mean jobs for American workers.
00:50:14.000So I think a large part is going to have to do with the different jobs that are coming back.
00:50:20.000I think a lot of it's going to, one of the big markers, the benchmarks is going to be what our trade balances look like with China and with the rest of the world.
00:50:34.000I think that this Communist Party is extremely brittle.
00:50:37.000I think that your father, he's not doing regime change, but I think he's, I think their response to him, I think it's an unstable regime right now.
00:50:51.000But again, the other thing is the pride in our country, because really the Chinese have jumped on this demoralization campaign.
00:50:58.000And whether it has to do with fentanyl or whether it has to do with people hating America or distrusting America or not believing anything anymore about America, and this is unfortunately afflicting the right as well as the left.
00:51:09.000So I think also it's a matter of restoring national pride, how we feel about our country, how deeply we love our country, our pride and prestige.
00:51:54.000You talk about the real estate market because for, you know, we remember for decades that you would see these giant massive cities in China.
00:52:43.000We are a constitutional republic, extremely resilient.
00:52:48.000We have a lot of problems, but that's sort of built in the system, how we fight these things out, how we figure these things out.
00:52:55.000So I think just the basic fundamentals makes the United States so much stronger.
00:53:01.000People talk about the People's Liberation Army.
00:53:03.000You might remember a couple of years ago when they had those videos of when those videos of PLA soldiers doing acrobatic trips and flipping around and doing this and that.
00:53:14.000Like, oh, wow, we have problems with our DEI Pentagon.
00:53:18.000This was before Pete Hegseth got there.
00:53:20.000Well, a friend of mine who had served in a very hard-charging U.S. military unit and who spent some time working on China stuff said, yeah, people don't understand the Chinese military is actually pretty soft.
00:53:33.000And what they have to, because they had that one-child policy for so long and all of these moms babied their son so much.
00:53:43.000So a lot of it is toughening up, trying to toughen up Chinese men.
00:53:48.000But the Chinese play it very well, that, oh, no, no, it's actually very tough.
00:53:52.000And so once you understand what's behind it or what's beneath it, you have a very different picture of this Communist Party.
00:54:19.000I mean, I guess, you know, the last question perhaps I'd have is, you know, to the point of what we were just talking about, you know, maybe it's not as stable.
00:54:28.000But with the advent of AI and sort of the social contracts that they have out there, could you ever actually have a real revolution against these existing governments?
00:54:42.000Or does the AI and the monitoring of people, does it prevent there from ever being a critical mass of people to actually fight back against this?
00:54:49.000And so you're locked into this system because the second there's a little bit of a little bit of a flare-up, a little bit of an uprising, they're just pulled out of the system, which would cause any of that momentum to die.
00:55:03.000And again, to come back to COVID, this is one of the things that worried a lot of us during COVID.
00:55:07.000And we see this all the time now with the amount, you know, the amount of surveillance that Republicans were put in under the Biden administration with Arctic Frost.
00:55:17.000So it's an enormous surveillance state and they keep very close tabs on people.
00:56:35.000You actually, off topic, but I think important.
00:56:38.000You mentioned Operation Arctic Frost, the government, the FBI spying on 20% of Democrats, Republican senators, literally wiretaps against conservative organizations.
00:56:52.000I mean, this sounds an awfully lot like China.
00:57:06.000Is there ever accountability to these people that are clearly breaking the law and going against one side on a politically biased and other witch hunt?
00:57:15.000I mean, this sounds just the extension of the plot against the president.
00:57:18.000It's just the plot against anyone who happens to not be a Democrat.
00:57:22.000Well, the subtitle of Plot Against the President was the biggest political scandal in U.S. history.
00:57:28.000And I believe that Russia Gate is the template for all of these different operations and campaigns targeting your father, his aides, and his supporters.
00:57:45.000And look, the way that I see it is the people your father put in place, like Cash, Battal, like Pam Bondi, this is the best shot at accountability we'll have.
00:58:09.000We have to have, yeah, we have to have indictments and we need convictions as well.
00:58:17.000Because the only way that people in the future, the argument I make is the only way that people in the future will understand what happened is for there to be convictions, for people to be led away in orange jumpsuits, because the press can spin this any way they want until those people are convicted.
00:58:32.000Then they have to say, well, here's what that guy is accused of doing.
00:59:06.000I can't bear the thought that New York City schoolchildren are likely to be taught for the next century that the 45th and 47th president of the United States was a Russian spy.
00:59:19.000But unless there's real accountability, that these guys are held responsible by the criminal justice system, it terrifies me to say so, but that's what I think we're going to wind up with.