Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, is wrong. Donald Trump’s latest attack on China, the “deep state” inside his own country, the intelligence officials who briefed him in the White House, and America’s electoral system are not the “ramblings of a mad king”.
It is much worse than that.
If it were the case that Trump believed the very foundations of American democracy are under attack from Beijing in the most direct and verifiable way – by buying voter data and making fake ballots – then China would be, and should be, under economic sanctions.
Xi Jinping’s agents of turmoil would, and should, be rounded up and expelled. America’s technological systems would, and should, be purged on a gigantic scale and we would, and should, be tossing our iPhones into the toilet bowl.
China is a malevolent but much more subtle force. It has subverted the West’s independence by getting us all as addicted to its manufactured products just as the British got China addicted to opium. China has stolen hundreds of billions worth of intellectual property from the West.
And now China is strangling access to rare earth minerals and crippling the ability of western battery manufacturers to compete with its strategic control of next-generation technologies.
Trump knew all this when he recently visited the Chinese leader in Beijing. He may have mentioned these issues behind closed doors, but in public, the relationship between the two leaders could not have been more cordial.
But now Trump has taken to a presidential broadcast from the White House to announce that American elections are vulnerable “to hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference” and accused the People’s Republic of China of carrying out “the largest compromise of election data in history” by acquiring election data – much of which is commercially available for purchase by political campaigns and other interested parties.
“They wanted to just make you sound like your president wasn’t so hot, when actually your president has done a great job, and they did everything possible to do exactly that,” he said.
Trump’s Republican Party faces terrible polling and is set to be damned by association with the presidency come the November mid-term elections to Congress. According to a recent Ipsos poll, 61 per cent of Americans disapprove of the way that he is running the country.
And he is making sure that the country is being prepared for what he might next unleash – which is not a “mad king” moment but an all too rational consolidation of his power grab over most of America’s levels of authority.
He has met some resistance to his ongoing coup from within elements of the US judicial system, some states (notably Minnesota) has seen off his deployment of his storm troopers from ICE, but his control over the US security establishment is now almost total and deepens every day.
Any and every officer who wants to advance to the top ranks in the defence or intelligence establishment knows that he, and these days it is almost always only a he, will need to have a long record of sycophantic support for D Trump.
He blames men like general Mike Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff when he was first president, for thwarting his efforts to subvert America’s democratic processes when American securocrats called themselves the “grownups in the room” and mitigated some of Trump’s worst instincts.
He told America that the “deep state” conspired against him in 2020 along with China to rob him of the election that he lost.
He has pardoned almost all of those who conspired to overturn those elections results with a violent attack on Congress on 6 January 2021.
Now he is trying to ram legislation through the US Congress that would disenfranchise huge numbers of voters who might vote against his party in November called the SAVE America Act.
The US has been the subject of widespread and systematic social media election interference by Russia, mostly in support of Trump, and by China.
Both nations have weaponized the internet to sow discontent, manipulate voters and create a universal sense of distrust in the structures that underpin western democracies.
But no one has done as good a job as disrupting the US Constitution as Trump himself.
His public attack on China is not a geostrategic play, or a wider reckoning with the growing power of Beijing.
He is preparing the ground for the outcome of the November elections that is looking increasingly likely that it may not go his way.
