President Donald Trump’s appeared to shower Chinese President Xi Jinping with affection this week. The president feted Xi with a state dinner and even offered guests a tour of Trump’s big, beautiful ballroom. The day after, the president said that the Chinese premier agreed with his attempt to rebrand AI as “super intelligence.”
All of this might have been well and good for the president, but it yielded few results that the president could offer to Americans with fewer than 40 days until the midterm elections when Republicans are bracing for a bloodbath.
Ahead of the actual dinner, Republicans seemed to be somewhat apprehensive about Trump rolling out the red carpet for Xi despite his years of hawkish rhetoric on China.
“To me, rolling out the red carpet for Xi when we have evidence to suggest that they've at least at some point in time over the Iranian conflict assisted them with at least information they use for targeting, why we're rolling the red carpet out for somebody like that wouldn't have been on my handbill,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) told The Independent.
Tillis is somewhat more free to speak his mind considering he is retiring at the end of the year after his public falling out with Trump last year.
But Tillis is like many other Republicans who have framed China as one of the major threats to global peace in the past decade. In fact, Trump has been one of the toughest talkers on China, imposing tariffs that kicked off the trade war.
And this is to say nothing of the fact that Trump also featured tech CEOS like NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Google’s Sergey Brin at a time when many Americans are understandably growing increasingly mistrustful of big tech and anxious about AI.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), perhaps the foremost critic of the tech industry and China on the Republican side, had a fairly hedged comment about rolling out the red carpet for Xi.
“Well, it’s the president's carpet to roll out, and you know I'm counting on him to be tough on China as he has been,” he told The Independent. Hawley and plenty of conservatives argued when the war in Ukraine began that Europe should shoulder the burden to push back against Russia while the United States kept an eye on China.
And rather than even feign hearing out people’s concerns, the president has called fears about AI “more of a Hoax than even that of RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA, UKRAINE, UKRAINE, UKRAINE, UKRAINE, and Climate Change!” House Speaker Mike Johnson dismissed the House of Representatives last week as he brushed off calls to regulate AI.
But Trump’s willful disconnection seems to be costing the GOP. An NBC News poll showed that Democrats now have a nine-point advantage in the generic ballot, which tracks whether voters will elect a generic Democrat or Republican to the House of Representatives.
Republicans are all but scrambling now to flip seats in Georgia and Michigan, once seen as their best shots, but they are now forced to play defense in bright-red states like Kansas, Iowa and Texas. All the while, most Republicans voted with Trump to keep his unpopular Iran war going on Thursday.
In North Carolina, Republican Michael Whatley, the former Republican National Committee chairman, is now getting trounced in polls against popular former Democratic governor Roy Cooper. Tillis said he wants to stop the bleeding despite his clashes with Trump.
“We've got work to do there, and I'm going to work on getting unaffiliated voters out to try and prevent that from occurring,” he told The Independent.
But nowhere is the Republican crisis more apparent than in Texas, where Trump endorsed scandal-ridden Attorney General against incumbent Republican Sen. John Cornyn in the primary. Now, despite millions of resources going into the Lone Star State, Paxton trails Democrat James Talarico in almost every poll.
“It's hard to change people's minds once they've reached a conclusion about a candidate, and I think that's the problem that Mr. Paxton is having now,” Cornyn told The Independent with not a dash of glee.
But Trump has essentially saddled the GOP with an unpopular war, even more unpopular candidates and an unwillingness to throw his muscle behind them. Rather, he’s too busy hobnobbing with tech CEOs and giving tours of the ballroom while many Americans see gas prices climb.
