14 minutes to obliterate Hong Kong: deconstructing Donald Trump’s bizarre boast
- Yonden Lhatoo breaks down the US president’s astonishing claim that he stopped his Chinese counterpart from wiping out the protest-torn city with a million PLA troops
Ridiculing Donald Trump is too easy. There’s more than enough of that going on already, and it’s become an exercise in futility because America’s 45th president is who he is, will say what he will say, and will do what he will do.
“If it weren’t for me, Hong Kong would have been obliterated within 14 minutes,” Trump boasted in a phone interview on Fox & Friends, his audiovisual Wikipedia of world news. Chinese President Xi Jinping “has got a million soldiers standing outside of Hong Kong that aren’t going in only because I asked him, please don’t do that”.
Any willing suspension of disbelief hits a snag right away when he claims a million PLA troops are all revved up at the border, poised to pounce on Hong Kong, with only his magnanimous eminence preventing them from wiping us all out, apparently.
And what is with the specificity of that strange “14 minutes” reference? The Eastern Theatre Command of the People’s Liberation Army has already said its troops would only need 10 minutes to reach Hong Kong from Shenzhen. So that means another four minutes to “obliterate” this city? Unless Trump just plucked the number out of thin air, as he has often been known to do.
This kind of talk also exposes an appalling lack of understanding as to how things really work in this part of the world, and how Beijing won’t need the likes of Trump to prevent a crackdown on Hong Kong that it doesn’t even need to contemplate, let alone execute, when it can showcase the endless anarchy here as proof to the international community of its tolerance and benevolence.
When will our starry-eyed revolutionaries understand that Hong Kong is just a minor pawn to be sacrificed in the greater chess tournament of the US-China trade war
Don’t forget the chaos that has overtaken this city of fewer than 7.5 million works to the Communist Party’s propagandist advantage, enabling it to convince more than 1.4 billion people across the border that this is what happens without its unifying leadership. Sure, Beijing officials do make the occasional, obligatory threatening sounds, but they have allowed Hong Kong to burn for half a year now and look set to play the long game.
Trump claims he told Xi, “You will be making a big mistake. It’s going to have a tremendous negative impact on the trade deal.”
Keep that in mind when looking at how Trump hinted he might veto the so-called Hong Kong Democracy and Human Rights Act, which has just been passed by both chambers of the US Congress. That scurrilous piece of legislation concocted by snake-oil hucksters on Capitol Hill hell bent on cutting off Hong Kong’s nose to spite Beijing’s face, while pretending to offer a cure for protesters’ ills, is aimed at stripping this city of its special status as a separate trading entity from the rest of China and badly hurting business – meaning the only losers would be Hongkongers themselves.
“We have to stand with Hong Kong,” Trump declared, responding directly to a popular protest slogan appealing for international support. “But I’m also standing with President Xi. He’s a friend of mine. He’s an incredible guy.”
It must be a highly confusing time to be waving the star-spangled banner on our streets these days.
Yonden Lhatoo is the chief news editor at the Post
