Politics

What Trump really said about Megan Markle and other commentary

Foreign desk: China Has Zero Tiananmen Regrets

Speaking Sunday on the coming 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, China’s defense minister, Gen. Wei Fenghe, asked an international audience in Singapore: “How can you say that China handled it improperly?” The Sydney Morning Herald’s Peter Hartcher thinks Wei’s shameless answer was a “telltale sign of a regime that is unapologetic and increasingly confident.” A decade since the Great Recession exposed the fragility of Western order, Hartcher notes, the Beijing regime has grown ever bolder in asserting its own authoritarian values. Then, too, Wei’s hard-line response reflects President Xi Jinping’s stated belief that the Soviet Union “collapsed because no one was ‘man enough’ to defend the Communist Party’s rule.” Hartcher concludes: “If the Chinese Communist Party can justify to itself the brazen murder of its own people, it can justify anything.”

Gossip: What Trump Actually Said About Markle

The Spectator’s resident gossip, Cockburn, snarks: “Fight, fight, fight! That’s what everyone wants when it comes to Meghan Markle and Donald Trump.” To the media, the brash American president, scheduled to make a state visit to Britain soon, and the liberal-minded American royal are destined to clash — not least because Trump described Markle as “nasty” in an interview after being told that she considers him a misogynist. But as Cockburn notes, Trump is, in fact, a “keen monarchist,” and he’s determined to “play nice” with the royal family. “People won’t look beyond to see what Trump also said about Meghan. He was in fact full of praise. He said: ‘It’s nice, and I’m sure she will do excellently. She will be very good. I hope she does [succeed].’ ”

Campaign watch: Dems Aim at Trump, Hit Biden

Presidential hopefuls Pete Buttigieg and Seth Moulton derided Trump for his five Vietnam War draft deferments, “but their ultimate target might be Joe Biden,” notes The Washington Examiner’s Emily Larsen. Biden received one more draft deferment for school than Trump and the same 1-Y medical classification, “meaning that he was unqualified for duty except in a national emergency.” Trump has been accused of faking a bone spur, while Biden’s excuse of childhood asthma is inconsistent with his own description of an “active youth,” Larsen points out. The claims against Trump, she suggests, are a way to subtly make the same dig at Biden, all without undermining “the Obama administration’s record.” Draft-avoidance allegations have “long haunted politicians” of a certain age, and this time, second- and third-tier candidates hope the attack kills two birds with one stone.

Centrist: Stop Making Fun of Biden’s Crowds

Turnout for Joe Biden’s campaign events has been underwhelming, but this has no correlation to how the former veep is doing in the polls. Although his opponents are telling Biden supporters to be worried, “what really matters is voter turnout,” argues Matt Lewis at The Daily Beast. Given that Biden’s “appeal is predicated on a return to normalcy,” the sizes of his crowds aren’t necessarily the best gauge for his popularity among voters weary of spectacle politics of the Trumpian variety. Still, now that naysayers have raised the concern, “the negative reports about momentum and enthusiasm can become self-fulfilling prophecies.” The best thing for Biden to do is to ignore the “mockery” and not let it impact his strategy. Lewis’ advice to the team: “Remember that the fans don’t run your campaign.”

From the right: Robert Mueller, Norm-Breaker

In Politico, Rich Lowry writes: “In the end, the by-the-book Robert Mueller wildly departed from the book.” The special counsel, long lionized on the left as a guardian of norms, “invented an extra-constitutional legal standard for his obstruction investigation and acted, at the very least, in violation of the spirit of the special counsel regulations.” For starters, his recent news conference went against prosecutorial tradition of not muddying waters after deciding not to bring charges, since he “ditched the presumption of innocence, a bedrock of the American legal system” and framed his task as finding “conclusive evidence” of President Trump’s innocence, when it fact it was to find conclusive of guilt. Bottom line: Mueller’s “performance won’t age well — and shouldn’t.”

— Compiled by Sohrab Ahmari & Ashley Allen