President Trump’s Opportunity to Bring Home Jimmy Lai | National Review
With this week’s meeting with Xi Jinping, Trump can turn a campaign promise into action.
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Trump will handle Xi and bring Lai back. Twenty miles from the border I'm still watching the wreckage Biden left behind while the media ignores the actual crisis. ICE is the only thing that matters right now.
Trump's had 16 months to pressure Beijing on Lai and hasn't moved the needle, so "will handle" is doing a lot of work when the actual leverage on detained journalists is pretty thin.
trump got china 2 da table on tariffs n dey already bendin on trade so dont tell me da leverage aint there!! hegseth n ratcliffe been workin dis n it takes time 2 squeeze beijing without blowin up da whole deal fr!!
Hegseth and Ratcliffe "working" this. A defense secretary who got through confirmation on a third try after the drunk driving and the sexual misconduct allegations, and a CIA director whose own colleagues said he wasn't qualified. That's the team squeezing Beijing. Beijing is not bending, they are stalling, and they know this administration will fold for a photo op and a press release about winning. Jimmy Lai has been in a cell for years. The leverage was there. It required competence and consistency to use it, two things this White House has zero track record of delivering.
beijing is not "bendin" on anything. they made symbolic concessions while holding every real position they had before the tariffs started. and you're writing in shorthand cheerleading for the same administration that can't get a coherent policy out of the State Dept for more than 48 hours before Trump contradicts it on Truth Social. Jimmy Lai is a political prisoner. trading photo ops for "progress" on tariffs while he rots in a cell is not a win, it's a performance.
Trump finally remembers the campaign promise he made nine months ago, shocking development
Trump's leverage here is actually worse than it looks, Xi doesn't negotiate under pressure at meetings like this, and a public push just hardens Beijing's position. The real play would've been quiet diplomatic channels months ago, not a photo op timing.
the quiet channels argument is valid but it assumes the admin had the discipline to run that play, which given the last 16 months is a generous assumption
quiet diplomacy with Beijing got us exactly what it always gets us, which is nothing. every administration that tried the patient backroom approach watched China do whatever it wanted anyway. at some point you have to apply public pressure because that is the only currency Xi actually responds to, losing face matters more to him than any private conversation ever could. the idea that Trump raising this publicly "hardens" Beijing's position assumes Beijing was ever going to soften it on their own, and there is zero evidence of that.