FROM EIR DAILY ALERT
The Trump-Xi Dinner and the Role of the Individual
Dec. 6, 2018 (EIRNS)—President Donald Trump’s top economic advisor Larry Kudlow said yesterday that he had never seen Chinese President Xi Jinping “up close” until his Dec. 1 dinner with President Trump. There he had seen the real chemistry between the two Presidents. (Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has recalled that President Xi spoke for 45 minutes, taking Trump through “very specific plans.”) Kudlow said that when President Trump asked Xi whether he would reconsider the U.S. advanced chipmaker Qualcomm’s takeover of its Dutch counterpart NXP, blocked by China, Xi answered “Yes,” almost without hesitation. When Trump asked him whether he would classify the deadly synthetic opioid fentanyl as a “controlled substance,” again, Xi answered “Yes,” almost without hesitation.
Fentanyl, much of it mailed from China, was the predominant synthetic opioid responsible for 30,000 of the 72,000 U.S. drug-overdose deaths in 2017.
High-level distribution of a “controlled substance” in China is potentially a capital offense, and Trump would like to institute the death penalty for high-level, death-dealing drug kingpins here in the U.S. as well. The several commissions and conferences he has organized to fight drugs, have mainly endorsed the same old recipes of the “experts” who have failed at this for year after year, as the death toll continues to mount without limit.
Trump tweeted that the death penalty for fentanyl kingpins in China will have “incredible” results. “It could be a game-changer,” he wrote. More generally, Trump tweeted that “President Xi meant every word” of what he had said, “on all the subjects discussed.”
