China Gets Tacit Okay To Move On Hong Kong From Trump

The political pressure cooker used by Trump to govern with has been breached and may not be repairable.  While the political strategy of dissent and grievance continues to simmer and be driven by Trump's governing style and campaign for reelection here at home underneath the cover of the unabated sear of the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump's foreign policy negligence goes politically unchecked through via the distracted eye of the corporate media here at home and abroad.  In 1997 when the United Kingdom's lease on Hong Kong expired there was a "gentleman's agreement" between the still very much communist government of China and the provincial government of Hong Kong letting the city keep its unique status of a free market that thrived within the confines of a democratic political structure granted by an exceptional status that would transition over a period of fifty years to complete Chinese government control.  It is obvious by now that "gentlemen's agreement" has collapsed, along with the democratic government of Hong Kong as the government of China prepares to move in with its military to administer the political and cultural hand of oppression and suppression. 

Meanwhile Trump has given a Tacit okay to the Chinese government and Secretary Xi Jinping to go through with this move on Hong Kong as the White House walks a tight rope clinging to the prospects of a trade agreement still unresolved between the two countries.  What's going seemingly unnoticed is the continuing and ever expanding chasm between the United States and the western world politically and socially driven by the vacuum of an absentee leadership role by Trump as he turns his back on our European allies and the rest of the western hemisphere.  His "America First" policy, as Trump likes to call it, is by day proving to be economically and politically detrimental and expensive for our nation in its relations outside of our boarders as we turn inward and withdraw from a global community grasping for a leader pull us out of this global pandemic.

While we had a world leader and statesman do just that from the confines of a wheelchair at the outbreak of World War II with President Roosevelt we find ourselves with a President who won't even wear a medical mask in public as he politically flails about in an environment fraught with massive unemployment and unrest over how to handle the pandemic as it spreads across the country.  His lack of leadership at home and abroad is on the verge of undoing what over 150 yeas of healing in post Civil War America had made possible with the election of its first black President. 

We were only now beginning to form scars over the scabs that still existed from a war that nearly destroyed us from within.  The fact that Trump can almost undo all of that work in a short four years has only underlined how tenuous it has been over a century and a half.  If he gets four more years those scabs may turn out to be wounds that will not ever heal in the political environment we have now that makes us what we were to the world: a beacon of hope and unity.