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From the Washington Post’s website: “Trump speaks with Taiwanese president, a major break with decades of US Policy on China.”

Only Nixon can go to China. Only Trump can pick up the phone and fuck up everything that’s happened since then in thirty seconds.

As the Post’s piece will tell you, the reason this is a big deal is that our diplomatic relations with China depend on our officially pretending that Taiwan is a province of China, rather than an autonomous political entity with which, say, the US can have separate diplomatic relations. By talking directly to the president of Taiwan, Trump is de facto resuming diplomatic relations with Taiwan, which were suspended in 1979. Which means, you know, who knows what will now happen to our diplomatic relations with China. 

In the media people are still having the “is Trump merely crazy and stupid or is he crazy and stupid like a fox” debate. Well, here is what, for me, definitively ends that debate:

“

The Taipei Times reported ahead of the call Friday that it was arranged to congratulate Trump on his election victory last month and to express hopes for an expanded relationship with the United States.”

There’s a lot of passive voice here, but it does sound to me as if this call was the president of Taiwan’s idea, not Trump’s. They’ve been watching the same campaign we’ve been watching. And someone, at some point, said, quick, set up a call with him before someone tells him why he shouldn’t take it. And they did, and they basically tricked him into recognizing Taiwan.

He is an idiot who has no fucking idea what he’s doing and everyone in the world knows that and other world leaders are already starting to play him. And it’s working.

This is going to end badly.

For the love of God and the good of mankind, someone has to get this clown off the grid. Because no matter how fucking STUPID he is, no matter how unintentional his actions actually are, when he interacts with world leaders, that means something, just because he is the President-Elect of the United States. If they don’t start a war on purpose they’re going to wind up starting one by accident.

Someone just has to take the phone away from him. All that FUCKING GRIEF over Hillary Clinton’s private email server, and Trump is going to destroy the planet with a fucking smartphone.

So I was just reading up on this over at the Washington Post.

There are differing stories about exactly how the call happened:

“Many questions remain about the conversation between Trump and Tsai. The president-elect tweeted Friday that Tsai called him, rather than the other way around. Tsai’s office said later, however, that the call was arranged in advance by both sides. …

Analysts are divided on whether it represented a mix-up between the two governments or a more significant signal about the type of foreign policy that can be expected from the U.S. president-elect.”

So if in fact this was arranged in advance, then someone on Team Trump was in on this, and I guess that person may or may not have known what he was doing. I remain convinced, however, that Trump himself has no fucking clue. Trump, on his Twitter anyway, is mainly upset that anyone is suggesting that there’s anything that could possibly be more important than Trump getting to hear from another world leader about how awesome he is.

So China has formally complained about this, to our current government. Another fun thing is that today, Trump also spoke to Rodrigo Duterte, who’s president of the Phillippines, and who called Obama a “son of a whore” because Obama thought that Duterte’s plan to deal with the Phillippines’ drug problem by shooting suspected drug dealersin the streets was not a good idea. According to Duterte, Trump thinks that executing people en masse–and by “en masse” I mean that according to this piece his government has executed 4,500 people in five months without any form of due process–because someone thinks or claims to think they might be drug dealers is a FABULOUS idea:

“According to Duterte, his plan to ‘kill all’ the country’s suspected drug users and dealers — a plan that has been condemned by the United States, the European Parliament and the International Criminal Court, among others — now has the backing of the U.S. president-elect. The campaign has left at least 4,500 Filipinos dead over about five months.

During the call, Duterte said, Trump told him he was doing it the ‘right way.’ ”

So far nobody on Trump’s side has confirmed this. But you know what? It really doesn’t matter. Because we can’t believe anything Trump or his spokespeople say, about this or about anything else. And the entire world knows this. Did he in fact tell Duterte to go right on with his program of state-sponsored murder cause that’s an awesome way to deal with a complex social problem? Duterte says he did. Even if Trump later says he didn’t, how is anyone ever to know what really happened? Even suppose Trump didn’t support the program and even suppose, let’s say, his team is actually horrified that this is out there, what can they do about it? He has no credibility and neither do they.

This is where we’re at, folks. The future President of the United States just endorsed a government’s plan to execute its citizens in en masse, at will, without any form of legal process or any limit to how many people will be killed or how long it will go on. At least that’s what many people are saying. 

For a guy who has not even been sworn in yet he has done a LOT of fucking damage already.

And for those of you following this story: The Washington Post’s Simon Denyer brings us the I Meant To Do That edition. Basically the story coming out of sources from Team Trump Transition now is that this phone call was a deliberate attempt to test the waters regarding the brilliant new pro-Taiwan policy that Reince Priebus and some other people on the team intend to adopt. Here’s my favorite part, in the section about this article in Foreign Policy written by some of Trump’s tools:

“The article, flagged to China experts as a significant policy blueprint, described Taiwan as the most militarily vulnerable U.S. partner anywhere in the world. and called for a comprehensive arms deal to help it defend itself against China.

Friday’s phone call does not necessarily mean that will happen, but it does look like the first sign of a recalibration by a future Trump administration, experts say.”

So we have basically 3 possible ways to understand that phone call.

1) Trump is an idiot who got played by the President of Taiwan.

2) Trump is an idiot who is being used to pursue the foreign policy agenda of the people around him.

3) Trump is an idiot who wants to put his name on a tower in Taiwan (the Post has not suggested this as a possible motivation, but I’m just gonna assume that it’s always a possible motivation for him). 

Whichever story you believe, the outcome is: the Trump administration is gonna piss off China. Probably a lot. While arming Tawian. And possibly setting us up for one of Vizzini’s Classic Blunders. No, not the one about going up against a Sicilian when death is on the line.

What’s interesting about that Foreign Policy article is that it appears to contain, in a far more coherent form, most of the talking points regarding Hillary Clinton’s policies on Asia that used to spew out of Donald Trump in random and fragmentary bursts during the debates. These are obviously the guys who briefed him, or rather tried to brief him.