What to expect from Biden and Xi’s San Francisco meetup.
As President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping meet in San Francisco today, the two leaders find themselves in different positions than when they met last year in Bali, Indonesia.
Back then, each was in a position of strength — Biden coming out of a triumphant midterm election and Xi a well-orchestrated party conference that solidified his rule — and both used that first in-person meeting as an occasion to soothe tensions.
Then came the Chinese balloon floating over the United States that tore at the already tenuous condition of US-China relations. The incident bolstered hawks in America gunning for a more assertive US policy toward China (though, under Biden, like Trump, the policy has already been pretty hawkish). Since then, each country’s leader has been tested. Biden has faced troubling poll numbers and gets flack from House Republicans who argue that even meeting with Chinese leaders is a form of capitulation. And now, Israel’s war on Gaza threatens American power globally and possibly Biden’s reelection.
In China, mass protests against Xi’s zero-Covid policies significantly undermined him and forced the country to open up in a somewhat haphazard fashion. His weakness has been exposed as he’s grappled with an economic slowdown and reshuffled ministers.
Now, just sitting down together is considered a success. Wednesday’s meeting on the sides of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit will be the first time in a year the leaders of the world’s two largest economies have talked. This isn’t a big-picture realignment but a tactical cooling, with the hope that presidential diplomacy can yield more diplomatic breakthroughs in the distant future and mitigate the risk of outright conflict in the nearer one.
So, the achievement likely to come out of this year’s Biden-Xi summit is, simply, the meeting itself. If there are policy announcements that emerge from the conversation, experts told me, they are likely to be minor. “It’s been a rough few years in US-Chinese relations,” Sharon Burke, a former senior Defense official, told me. “So the prospect of potentially getting back to a more normal pace, where we’re going to remain contentious, but that we can actually meet and talk about, especially mutual interests, is important — even if it doesn’t result in headline-grabbing agreements or compromises.”
This builds on several months of Biden seeking calm, often saying that the administration doesn’t want a new cold war with China even as some of its policies suggest otherwise. His national security cabinet has shuttled to Beijing and in the process built confidence that diplomacy remains the best path forward with China. The Biden administration has sought this entente but doesn’t always get its calls returned (like during the balloon crisis). China, for what it’s worth, has cooled its rhetoric toward the US recently, putting out official statements ahead of today’s meeting that focus on stabilizing relations.
Though war in the Middle East is draining the Biden administration’s foreign policy attention, the issue of China endures as the most significant globally. The president’s entire foreign policy is organized around countering China.
“Both sides have probed at the bottom line of the other side,” Yun Sun, an analyst at the Stimson Center, told me. “Both sides have pushed, have bullied, have screamed, and have offered enticement. And so basically, all the different approaches have been tried. Now, people are at a much more sober understanding as for what is possible and what is viable.”
When Biden and Xi meet in San Francisco
This is likely the last time the two leaders will meet for some time. “Historically speaking, sitting presidents running for reelection don’t see it as advantageous to their reelection campaigns to meet with their Chinese counterparts during election years,” Ryan Hass, a researcher at the Brookings Institution, told me.
Biden has kept in place many of Trump’s policies toward China. Still, Biden’s emphasis on diplomatic engagement is a contrast to Republicans who have flaunted a militaristic approach to China, as seen at recent presidential debates. Trump, for his part, said nice things about Xi recently (“He’s like Central Casting”), but a second Trump term would almost certainly strain US-China relations further.
So what will the Chinese hope to get out of this summit? “They’re looking for an opportunity to show the Chinese people that President Xi was treated with dignity and respect on the world stage, that he was viewed as a world leader of stature and significance,” Hass, who served in the Obama White House, explained. “And I think that they’re probably going to try to use the meeting to set down markers around their expectations around Taiwan, given that Taiwan has an election upcoming in January of next year.”
Analysts will also be watching whether there will be some resumption of military-to-military relations between the two countries. The Chinese balloon further tested the prospect of communication, which China had largely suspended after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August 2022. The two sides are working on that, Sun explained, but each country has different expectations. The US wants to resume both high-level and working-level contacts, while the Chinese are taking an incremental approach and are using this all as a point of leverage.
There may also be some movement on climate change. Biden’s envoy John Kerry said “some agreements” are in the works. “We cannot make progress in the world on climate change without the United States and China,” Burke, who is now president of the advisory firm Ecospherics, told me.
The US and China don’t currently have much by way of arms control agreements, so news that the two countries have even started talking arms control, as my colleague Jen Kirby recently reported, is major. So are feelers the US has put out about a new dialogue on limitations around AI and autonomy when it comes to nuclear weapons.
The small stuff may prove important, like an increase in the number of flights between the US and China, which plummeted since the pandemic. The two leaders will also discuss how to clamp down on the export of fentanyl.
The two countries also share an interest in a more stable situation in the Middle East. The US has leverage over Israel, and China over Iran, from which it buys much oil and with which it maintains diplomatic relations, unlike the US.
It would be difficult to imagine Biden and Xi putting out a Middle East peace plan. But any overlap between the interests of these two superpowers at this moment may prove crucial. “The Gaza crisis is seen as a potential area for collaboration or cooperation between the US and China,” Sun told me. And though that isn’t much, it’s a major departure from the extremely tense Alaska talks in March 2021.
Together, it represents something that has been largely absent in the first three years of the Biden administration: cooperation with China. It’s less about the substance coming out of today’s meeting and more about whether a structure will be in place the next time there’s a surprise (like the balloon) or a high-level US delegation in Taiwan.
For Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, the meeting is about the “continued importance of strengthening open lines of communication and managing competition responsibly so that it does not veer into conflict.”
The forward-looking, over-the-horizon question: Can the relationship continue on this route without spiraling into conflict? “Both sides have an innate desire to manage the competition,” Sun, who had just returned from Beijing, told me. “Xi Jinping needs a more stable external environment so that he can focus on his domestic problems. I suspect Biden is thinking the same way.”
A quiet meeting between Biden and Xi is a good start.
The code is so weak that it serves to legitimize Clarence Thomas’s corruption. It is literally worse than nothing.
On Monday, the Supreme Court released a new “code of conduct” laying out ethical principles that the justices claim they have always adhered to — and arguing that the only reason such a code is necessary is because the Court’s critics don’t understand how things actually work.
It’s the first time in its history that the Court has published a formal ethics code — but the introduction to this particular code makes it clear that the justices did so only reluctantly, and that they don’t actually intend for anything to change.
“For the most part these rules and principles are not new,” the introduction to the code claims, adding that “the absence of a Code … has led in recent years to the misunderstanding that the Justices of this Court, unlike all other jurists in this country, regard themselves as unrestricted by any ethics rules.” The new code was created “to dispel” this supposed “misunderstanding,” the justices write, and it “largely represents a codification of principles that we have long regarded as governing our conduct.”
The code, in other words, codifies the same rules that Justice Clarence Thomas followed when he spent nine days vacationing on Republican billionaire Harlan Crow’s superyacht — a trip which “could have exceeded $500,000” in value, according to ProPublica. The code also locks in place the same rules Thomas followed during his frequent summer trips to Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks. The code “represents a codification of principles” that Thomas followed when he bought a $267,230 RV that was underwritten by Anthony Welters, another of the many wealthy individuals who have lavished gifts on Thomas since he joined the Court.
According to ProPublica, these gifts include:
At least 38 destination vacations, including a previously unreported voyage on a yacht around the Bahamas; 26 private jet flights, plus an additional eight by helicopter; a dozen VIP passes to professional and college sporting events, typically perched in the skybox; two stays at luxury resorts in Florida and Jamaica; and one standing invitation to an uber-exclusive golf club overlooking the Atlantic coast.
The new code also seeks to “dispel” any impression that the justices “regard themselves as unrestricted by any ethics rules,” which may have been created when Justice Samuel Alito accepted a $100,000 private jet flight to Alaska from Republican billionaire Paul Singer, where Alito stayed in a fishing lodge that ordinarily charges more than $1,000 a day to guests, and where Alito was reportedly served wine that costs more than $1,000 a bottle.
The new code, which, again, by its own explicit terms largely seeks to put in writing the same rules that these justices followed when they accepted luxurious gifts from major Republican Party donors, is also almost entirely unenforceable. If a litigant, or one of the more than 300 million Americans governed by the Supreme Court, believes that one of the justices is violating the newly written-down rules, there is no mechanism to enforce those rules against a justice.
Indeed, the code is sometimes quite explicit about the fact that most of it has no enforcement mechanism. While it contains about three pages of rules governing when a justice must recuse themselves from a case, for example, an official commentary attached to the code states that “individual Justices, rather than the Court, decide recusal issues.” So if a justice decides to hear a case that the code says they should not hear, nothing happens because each individual justice has the final word on whether they must step aside from a case.
All nine of the justices, who signed their names to this code, should be ashamed of themselves. The new code imposes no meaningful obligations on the justices. It explicitly disclaims any desire to do so. It accuses the Court’s critics of “misunderstanding” the justices’ past behavior, when it really isn’t hard to understand the ethical implications of taking a $500,000 gift from a major political donor.
And the new rules do nothing whatsoever to limit Thomas’s corrupt behavior.
So what does the new code actually say?
The 15-page document the Supreme Court released on Monday has three parts: The brief introductory paragraph, which states that “for the most part these rules and principles are not new”; about nine pages dedicated to the actual code of conduct; and then another five pages of “commentary,” which explain how the justices interpret these rules.
Much of the rules section of the new code uses language that is similar or identical to the language of the Code of Conduct for United States Judges, ethical rules that have long governed judges on federal district and appeals courts whose decisions are reviewed by the Supreme Court.
But, while there are superficial similarities between the rules governing lower court judges and the rules that the Supreme Court now says it will comply with, there’s a big difference between these two sets of rules: The ones governing lower courts actually have teeth.
As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in 2011, the last time that Thomas’s penchant for accepting lavish gifts from Republican billionaires embarrassed the Court and forced Roberts to respond to calls for ethics reform, if a trial court judge refused to recuse from a case they are obligated to step away from, that “decision not to recuse is reviewable by a court of appeals, and a court of appeals judge’s decision not to recuse is reviewable by the Supreme Court.”
But “there is no higher court to review a Justice’s decision not to recuse in a particular case,” Roberts wrote at the time — and the new code does nothing to add accountability to justices who sit on cases they should not hear.
Worse, if you were handed a copy of the new code and its attached commentary, and were unfamiliar with the fact that this code arrives after seven months of painstaking reporting into Thomas’s corruption and his relationships with many wealthy Republicans who give him expensive gifts, you would have no idea that these scandals even exist.
The new rules contain only one provision limiting gift acceptance by the justices. And, while that provision appears on its face to impose fairly robust limits on the justices, the official commentary on the rules clarifies that this provision does not actually do anything to change the status quo.
Briefly, the new rules state that “a Justice should comply with the restrictions on acceptance of gifts and the prohibition on solicitation of gifts set forth in the Judicial Conference Regulations on Gifts now in effect.” If taken seriously, that would be a very significant restriction indeed, because the Judicial Conference Regulations on Gifts state that judges are “not permitted to accept a gift from anyone … whose interests may be substantially affected by the performance or nonperformance of the [judge’s] official duties.”
The Supreme Court, which has the power to overrule any decision made by Congress or a presidential administration, is arguably the most powerful policymaking body in the United States. It routinely hands down decisions that impact millions of Americans — in its last two terms alone, the Court stripped student loan relief from millions of student borrowers, it abolished affirmative action at most universities, it set fire to countless gun regulations, and it stripped the constitutional right to an abortion from anyone with a uterus.
All Americans, in other words, have “interests” that “may be substantially affected” by the performance of a justice’s official duties. So, if the Court actually took its new rules seriously, no justice would be allowed to accept a gift from anyone in the country.
But it’s clear from the commentary on the rules that the justices don’t actually intend to comply with such a gift ban. To the contrary, that commentary states that the new rules requiring the justices to comply with the Judicial Conference’s gift regulations merely “articulate the practice formalized in 1991 of individual Justices following the financial disclosure requirements and limitations on gifts, outside earned income, outside employment, and honoraria.”
So, while a superficial read of the new rules might suggest that the justices have accepted strict new restrictions on their ability to accept gifts, the commentary on the rules tells a very different story. According to that commentary, the justices have changed nothing. They are simply following the same practice they’ve followed since 1991, and Thomas may continue to treat gifts from Harlan Crow and other Republican billionaires the same way he’s treated them during his entire tenure on the Supreme Court — which also began in 1991.
The Supreme Court’s new ethics code, in other words, is the equivalent of a biography of John Wilkes Booth that focuses entirely on his acting career without ever mentioning the fact that he murdered President Abraham Lincoln. It goes out of its way to avoid mentioning the very thing that has sparked such widespread public outrage against an unethical Supreme Court. And then it states explicitly, in the rules’ official commentary, that the Court is doing nothing whatsoever to change the lax gifting norms that allowed Thomas to accept corrupt gifts over and over again.
It’s not hard to write an ethics code that actually works
It’s worth noting that the new code does contain fairly detailed rules governing exactly one thing: getting paid to teach at a university or law school.
According to the rules’ commentary, “a Justice may not accept compensation for an appearance or a speech,” but they may be paid for “teaching a course of study at an accredited educational institution or participating in an educational program of any duration that is sponsored by such an institution and is part of its educational offering.”
The amount that a justice may be paid for moonlighting as a professor is capped at roughly $30,000 per year. And, unlike other parts of the new ethics code, the rules governing paid teaching gigs actually has an enforcement mechanism that calls for third-party review of the justices’ activity. According to the commentary, “Associate Justices must receive prior approval from the Chief Justice to receive compensation for teaching; the Chief Justice must receive prior approval from the Court.”
There’s a straightforward explanation for why the Court has a real ethics code governing paid teaching gigs while the rest of its ethics rules are fluff and meaningless bluster. In 1969, Justice Abe Fortas resigned from the Supreme Court in disgrace after he accepted several dubious payments — including an arrangement where several clients at Fortas’s former law firm paid him $15,000 to teach at American University (about $130,000 in today’s dollars).
So the Court’s relatively strict rules governing paid teaching prevent a repeat of this particular scandal. The cap on payments ensure that justices do not pad their income too much with outside funds, while the requirement that at least one additional member of the Court review all paid university gigs helps screen out teaching assignments that may be corruptly funded.
Similarly, it would not have been hard to write ethics rules that prevent Thomas or Alito’s particular brand of corruption: accepting lavish vacations or other gifts from wealthy benefactors. The United States Senate, for example, generally prohibits members and staffers from accepting gifts valued at more than $50, and they place even stricter restrictions on gifts from lobbyists or foreign agents. The House imposes similar restrictions on its members and their staff.
Simply put, the Supreme Court knows how to write an effective ethics rule when it chooses to do so. And it has plenty of models it could have relied on from other powerful American institutions, which have already given serious thought to how to write a rule that prevents wealthy donors from lavishing gifts upon top policymaking officials. It simply chose not to do so.
The Supreme Court has no credibility to speak about ethics
The Roberts Court, of course, frequently opines on what sort of relationship government officials should have with wealthy benefactors who seek to buy influence. And its previous proclamations on this subject should not give anyone more confidence in this Court’s ability to root out corruption than its new, toothless ethics code.
Consider, for example, the Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC (2010), which permitted corporations and unions to spend unlimited sums of money to influence elections. According to the five Republican-appointed justices who joined that decision, elected officials being unusually responsive to donors is actually a good thing:
Favoritism and influence are not … avoidable in representative politics. It is in the nature of an elected representative to favor certain policies, and, by necessary corollary, to favor the voters and contributors who support those policies. It is well understood that a substantial and legitimate reason, if not the only reason, to cast a vote for, or to make a contribution to, one candidate over another is that the candidate will respond by producing those political outcomes the supporter favors. Democracy is premised on responsiveness.
So it’s not surprising that a Court that looks at multimillion-dollar checks being written to elect one official or another and shrugs it off with the phrase “democracy is premised on responsiveness,” may not have the most sophisticated ideas about what should be done when a Supreme Court justice routinely flies all over the globe at the expense of wealthy political donors.
This Supreme Court has long held people who believe that public officials should not be influenced by big donors in utter contempt. It’s not surprising that the Court’s new ethics rules display the same contempt for critics of the justices’ own corruption.
He’s talking like a fascist. He’s planning fascist policies. He’s staffing up with fascists.
Historically, the erosion of American democracy has happened subtly. In a country where democracy is basically a civic religion, politicians generally don’t announce their intention to attack it when running for office. The past decade of voter suppression laws, state-level rules explicitly designed to limit access to the ballot box, have been sold as tools for combating voter fraud. Many proponents of Jim Crow-era voting regulations — a nakedly racist attempt to ensure white political dominance — described them as a restoration of Southern democracy after the alleged Northern tyranny of Reconstruction.
Donald Trump is currently testing the limits of that unwritten rule by all but openly campaigning on a platform of tearing democracy down.
Perhaps the clearest sign came in a speech on Veterans Day where he vowed to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections.” Calling one’s opponents subhuman and vowing aggressive action against them is a hallmark of classical fascist rhetoric, so much so that the Washington Post’s headline — on a news article, not an opinion piece — described it as “echoing dictators Hitler [and] Mussolini.”
They’re not wrong: Anyone familiar with Nazi propaganda can tell you that it commonly dehumanized Jews by describing us as rats or diseases. Trump has used such language more than once: Just last month, he claimed immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.”
This incendiary language is backed by an incendiary policy agenda. Trump and his team have a series of proposals to crack down on dissent, including by remaking the Justice Department into a tool for jailing his enemies and sending troops to suppress protests. They aim to launch mass anti-immigrant raids and detain the people he rounds up in camps. They have extensive plans to replace as many as 50,000 career civil servants with ideologues and toadies, putting people ready and willing to undermine the rule of law in key positions to act on Trump’s dubious orders.
Given Trump’s track record, we should take these threats seriously. Let’s not forget that many thought it was unthinkable that Trump would attempt a kind of coup after the 2020 election. We now know that’s exactly what happened, up to and including inciting an actual riot on January 6.
There’s been a long-running debate among American political observers as to whether Trump can reasonably be described as a fascist. Between his increasingly fascist rhetoric and increasingly fascist second-term policy proposals, the debate should now be considered settled. A political leader who vows to destroy opponents he calls “vermin,” to weaponize the Justice Department against his critics, and to conduct political purges in the federal government is in fascist territory.
Trump is talking like a fascist, planning fascist policies, and staffing up with fascists. While a second Trump term is vanishingly unlikely to produce an openly fascist state — that’s not really how authoritarian takeovers of democracy work today — it’s quite plausible that they could do extensive, even fatal, damage to the American system by pulling the right policy levers. This is what happened in Hungary, and what is currently happening in India, Israel, and democracies around the world.
The fascist ideological positioning is a signal of intent: Trump is coming for American democracy. No one can say they weren’t warned.
Normal politics are over
Whenever someone warns of Trump’s fascist tendencies, there are always two instinctive dismissive reactions you see from elements of the political commentariat: both from Trump apologists and from reasonable centrists who want to avoid what they see as left-wing alarmism.
The first is to call it hyperbolic: Americans have long compared opposite-party presidents to fascists and been proven wrong each time. The second is to argue that the end of American democracy is unthinkable: The United States government has so many veto points that even a competent and determined authoritarian would find themselves hampered by Congress, federalism, and the courts.
In light of Trump’s increasingly open authoritarianism, neither of these should provide much comfort.
There is clearly a qualitative difference between Trump and previous presidents. As bad as (for example) George W. Bush’s record on civil liberties was, he didn’t refer to Democrats as “vermin” or vow to “root out” their presence in American life. He never even came close to firing tens of thousands of civil servants or remaking the Justice Department into a tool of personal revenge against political rivals. When he moved in that direction — firing nine US attorneys on seemingly political grounds — it produced a national outcry, a 22-month investigation, and the defenestration of top administration officials. Trump’s threats to do much worse, by contrast, seem to be fully supported by the institutional Republican Party.
Warnings of looming authoritarianism under prior presidents, typically issued by fanatical partisans and figures on the political fringe, may have proved false. But we have ample evidence that these warnings about Trump’s authoritarianism, increasingly coming from credible sources in the political mainstream, are grounded in the reality of what his second term would look like.
It’s also certainly true that Trump’s most dangerous moves would be contested at all levels of government; challenged by Democrats in Congress, hampered by court cases, and fought by Democratic-controlled state governments. But in the very best case, that means the gears of the federal government would grind to a halt during his presidency, as the entire system was consumed by the fight to defend itself from a hostile takeover. It’s hard to fully anticipate what the worst case looks like, but the breakdown of essential democratic functions — up to and including the basic fairness of the electoral system — is not off the table.
The evidence we have from foreign countries suggests that, when an elected leader with authoritarian tendencies spends time out of power, they get much more aggressive in trying to seize power when they return to high office. This is the story of how democracy in Hungary collapsed, and how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu brought his country to the brink. And though the United States is very different from both Hungary and Israel, we also have a long history of anti-democratic politics — one that the Republican Party has, in word and in deed, grown increasingly comfortable aping in recent years.
So while the extent to which Trump will succeed in making his vision a reality is certainly something that reasonable people can disagree about, the reality of that vision is not.
This should be the starting point for any conversation about the 2024 presidential race. Anyone who cares about American democracy — regardless of whether you side more with Democrats or Republicans on more “normal” issues like taxes, pollution regulations, or Israel-Palestine — should understand that its health is on the ballot. There has simply been too much business as usual, in which America’s political class treats 2024 as if it’s just another hotly contested election in a long line of them.
It isn’t, and the Trump campaign is making it clear that it isn’t on a regular basis. We in the press need to convey this to our readers as clearly as we can, a commitment which does not require abandoning the media’s core values of accuracy and fairness. On the contrary: It would be a betrayal of those values to shirk from reporting what the Trump people are telling us about themselves.
When the Washington Post asked Trump’s campaign for comment on claims that his “vermin” language echoed fascist rhetoric, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung responded like this: “Those who try to make that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House,” Cheung told the Post.
In a way, the denial confirms the charge. There’s something funny about Cheung vowing to “crush” the “entire existence” of anyone who dares call his boss a fascist. But there’s also chilling reality. Trump’s spokesperson is either convinced he won’t pay a price for such authoritarian rhetoric, authoritarian enough that he’s unable to tell how thuggish he sounds, or convinced that this is the way Trump expects his underlings to talk.
This is the operation that, at present, is beating President Joe Biden by about 1 percent in the RealClearPolitics poll average. It is past time to wake up.