The View | You know things are bad when Donald Trump is your only fan

Not too long ago, the Chinese stock market was booming and Alibaba’s Jack Ma was on the cover of every magazine. Now it’s back to the “China is a house of cards” scenario. And the country’s leaders, as the economist Paul Krugman put it, are “clueless.”

Donald Trump begs to differ, however. This billionaire US presidential candidate believes China is one of the best-run countries in the world.

In his view, the Chinese are smart - the real idiots are American politicians who handed jobs and technology to the country on a silver platter.

Among the smart things China’s leaders have done? “They’ve been devaluing the currency for years,” Trump barked last week in an interview with Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly, apparently unaware that the renminbi has in fact been appreciating for a decade, and in the past year, as the yen and euro collapsed, has been on one of the best-performing currencies on a real trade-weighted basis.

O’Reilly went on to ask Trump whether President Barack Obama was kowtowing to China by inviting “Xi Jinpang [sic]” to visit the United States, and treating him to a state dinner at the White House.

Trump took the bait, answering that if he were resident at the White House, President Xi Jinping would only get a McDonald’s hamburger. He softened his position slightly in the course of the interview – upgrading the meal to a “double-sized Big Mac.”