Triggered - Donald Trump Jr - The China Matrix with Journalist Lee Smith

Nov. 3, 2025 - Triggered - Donald Trump Jr

01:00:26

The China Matrix with Journalist Lee Smith | TRIGGERED Ep.288

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	Hey guys, welcome to another huge episode of Triggered.
	Today, journalist Lee Smith will be back with us.
	You all know him from the plot against the president.
	He's now out with a new book called The China Matrix, doing a deep dive into everything we've been talking about.
	The fentanyl crisis, the Wuhan lab leak cover-up, trade, espionage, theft of IP, and so much more.
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	Joining me now, author of the new book, The China Matrix, investigative journalist Lee Smith.
	Lee, how's it going, man?
	Good to have you back.
	Very well, Don.
	Thank you for inviting me back.
	Appreciate it.
	Oh, it's my pleasure.
	So, you know, you write that America's establishment has been in bed with the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, for 50 years.
	What do you think in researching your new book, what's the single most shocking example of betrayal you uncovered in your research?
	The one that made you say, I can't believe this actually happened.
	I can't believe that even these clowns did this.
	Well, there are quite a few, and it was pretty shocking.
	But the one that I'll pick out, which I think is really bad, we know a lot about what Hunter Biden did in China.
	We had access to Chinese capital, frankly.
	They staked him.
	But one of the reasons for that is what his father, Joe Biden, did as president.
	And what that was is Joe Biden made an agreement with the Chinese Communist Party to allow Chinese firms on U.S. capital markets, the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, and others, with no accountability.
	These firms defrauded American investors to the tune of billions and billions of dollars.
	So while we focus rightly on some of the U.S. manufacturers who left the United States, They screwed American middle class, American workers out of jobs, and they made a killing in China.
	It was also in the finance world.
	It was also on Wall Street.
	And so what Joe Biden did, I have to say, that's right at the top.
	It's really shocking.
	What are some of the examples of that?
	And what exactly happened?
	Well, I mean, what happened was that the Chinese had been, a lot of different Chinese firms had been listing on U.S. markets, and these were fraudulent firms, and they just ripped off U.S. investors.
	When investors started to get upset about this, Joe Biden and Xi Jinping, by the way, Xi Jinping, who is now the head of China, the president of China, the general secretary of the Communist Party, and the head of the military, he was vice president at the time.
	So he and Joe Biden arranged for a memorandum of understanding that let all these Chinese companies back onto markets without any transparency, no accountability.
	And unlike any other company in the world, Don, American companies have to prove that they're accountable.
	They have to have audits of their accounting and other things, not for the Chinese Communist Party companies.
	So that is one of the reasons why Hunter Biden, a lot of people think that the Biden relationship was just to prime the way in the event that Joe Biden might again come back to government.
	No, it was partly a reward for what Joe Biden had already done to pave the way for all these Chinese companies to, again, defraud American investors.
	And even the real Chinese companies that came on board, they were making billions and billions of dollars.
	As your father, the president, frequently points out, we have funded the Chinese military through our trade deficit with China, going back decades, and through capitalization on U.S. capital markets.
	So that's pretty shocking.
	And also the real big story underneath is just that, how much America has funded not just a challenger or a competitor, not just a rival, but what turns out to be a very serious adversary.
	Do we have any understanding of just how much money Hunter Biden made in some of these transactions?
	I mean, I know it was tens of millions in many cases, but you see more recently he's feigning bankruptcy and the guys that were funding his legal stuff have stopped doing it.
	Obviously, once they weren't in power, they no longer had any interest in preserving those relationships.
	But do we have an understanding of how much this is?
	Because when you talk about stuff like that, I mean, that seems like really big money.
	Well, I mean, it's extremely bad, the fact that he made any money.
	But again, I think a lot of this was a lure.
	A lot of this was rewarding him for what Joe Biden had done in the past.
	And I imagine that, you know, doing business in China is even hard for Hunter Biden, right?
	Because they don't make it easy on Americans.
	This is one of the points of the book.
	And American companies have been warned again and again, you will get taken advantage of.
	They will steal your intellectual property.
	They will force you to transfer technology.
	And this is one of the things that your father has been negotiating with over Xi dating back to his first term.
	So the fact that Hunter Biden didn't make the hundreds of millions or the billions that he might have hoped to have made in China comes as no surprise.
	Everyone who's greedy and everyone who has big eyes and thinks they're going to do great in China, no Americans have done very well in China.
	It's been an extraordinarily poisonous relationship.
	Yeah, I mean, that's one of, you know, as a 25, 30 business guy, that's like one of the unwritten rules.
	Like basically, if you're not local, you're not winning a lawsuit in China.
	The contract could say this.
	Everything could be very clear.
	It could be an obvious no-brainer.
	Like a 10 out of 10, 100 out of 100, like you lose.
	It's never going to happen.
	Meanwhile, they'll steal all your IP.
	They'll utilize it for whatever else it is.
	It's wild that they got away with it for so long.
	And American companies, again, they've been warned.
	This is one of the remarkable things that I found researching the book, speaking to people who worked for your father in the first term.
	Some of them are back there in the second term, but they said, Look, we warned a lot of these companies.
	If you go in, here's what's going to happen to you.
	And they say exactly what you said: you're going to have no recourse in the court system.
	There's nothing that you can do about it.
	We can't help you if you, you know, if you lose money and if you get ripped off there, we're warning you now, it's what's going to happen.
	And sure enough, it happened.
	But again, your father is making a bigger play saying this has to stop.
	Basically, the argument your father is making is something that people have known for a long time.
	The reason the Chinese Communist Party is where it is, is one thing, because they've leeched off of the United States, our investment, our manufacturing, our technology.
	The other thing is they've cheated, right?
	Whether it's manipulating currency, whether it's stealing intellectual property, whether it's forced technology transfers, and lots of other things, they cheat.
	It's a communist party.
	And I spoke with your father.
	He gave me a fantastic interview for this book, a very long interview.
	And, you know, this is what he was fighting for.
	And during the first term, during the first term, he came to understand different things.
	He already knew them.
	As I point out in the book, your father's been writing about the Chinese Communist Party since 2000, his book, The America We Deserve.
	So he wasn't fooled at all about what the Chinese are up to.
	A case that I've made is this is the person we want not just negotiation, not just negotiating with Xi Jinping, but guiding America through this incredibly perilous time and to de-link us from this poisonous party.
	So the subtitle of the book is The Epic Story of How Donald Trump Shattered a Deadly Pact.
	What is the pact that you're referring to?
	And what does it mean for what's happening now in the second term?
	The deadly pact is it started 50 years ago.
	The first chapter, again, starts with an interview with your father, and he talks about a lot of people will say about the U.S.-China relationship.
	Well, okay, granted, it's gotten a little bad, certainly since China entered the World Trade Organization.
	But the case that your father makes, and I think is exactly right, it's like, no, this happened in 1972 with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger when they went to China.
	Your father says in the book, he says, you know, a lot of people think that the worst thing Nixon did was Watergate.
	No, not by any means.
	The worst thing he ever did, he and Kissinger was opening us up to China.
	It didn't have to be this way.
	So that's what's been going on for more than half a century.
	And it's not just Democrats like Joe Biden, like Barack Obama, like Bill Clinton, who was the president who ushered China into the World Trade Organization.
	It's Republicans.
	Like Nixon, the Bushes were the worst.
	George H.W. Bush, and then George W. Bush, and George W. Bush's Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson.
	So Republicans did a lot of bad things.
	So, what the subtitle means is how Donald Trump shattered a deadly pact.
	Your father is the first president who's ever described the problem precisely and who's done something about it.
	And that's what he did this week.
	That's what he did this week in South Korea with his meeting with Xi.
	And what I try to explain to people is like, this isn't over by a long shot.
	This lasted throughout President Trump's first term, and this is going to be going on to the second term as well.
	And you have to understand the ups and downs, the negotiating tactics, and the big picture, what the president is looking for.
	So while it's good to see what's happening now, this is going to go through many, many ups and downs.
	And I urge people, Some people are confused about stuff like the tariffs.
	One of the things that I explain in the book is how tariffs have been a part of U.S. economic and national security since Alexander Hamilton.
	So when your father says stuff like tariffs, what a beautiful word, most beautiful word in the English language.
	He's absolutely right.
	But people are worried.
	They're a little worried about what all of this means.
	And so part of what the book is intended to do is to show people what the history of the U.S.-China relationship is like and also what the outcome is likely to look like with your father leaving the United States.
	Yeah, because the notion is, I mean, everyone was tariffing us essentially, one way or the other, whether it was explicitly or implicitly.
	Go try to buy a Ford in China.
	They were just preventing it from ever happening.
	So this notion of reciprocal tariffs makes a lot of sense.
	They've been doing it to us, but we always had to be the big schmuck that just, well, they can do it to us and we'll just do it to them.
	And a couple of big corporate juggernauts say, well, I can save two cents on my widget.
	So it doesn't really matter if we basically destroy our middle class, destroy our manufacturing base, and basically create the only export America's really had for the last few decades, which is our American dream.
	Right.
	Oh, that's a very nice way to put it.
	The history is very long.
	It started after, you know, it starts really after World War II, where people have this obsession with what I call a doctrine of free trade.
	Look, fair and free trade is great when it happens, but that's not what China's been doing.
	And other countries have been taking advantage of us for a long time as well.
	Before it was China, it was Japan and it was Germany.
	And there was a reasoning behind it.
	Well, these are important allies and there's the Soviet Union and we don't want to scare them.
	And plus they have to rebuild their economy after World War II.
	All of that made sense to an extent.
	But then you start to realize once it rolls into China as well, and we're making those same deals with a communist party, it's repugnant.
	And you realize who is taking the hit.
	It's the American middle class.
	And so what I try to show as well is I show the effects, the consequences of this.
	What's happened, the financial crisis, the failures of the global war on terror, the housing crisis, all of these different things are offshoots of this terrible relationship with the People's Republic of China.
	And that's what I mean about shattering the deadly pact.
	Your father's the first, there have been other political leaders on the right, like Jesse Helms, on the left, like Dick Gephardt.
	But your father's the first president.
	He says, we have to do something about this or we're going to pay a very steep price for our country.
	Yeah, Lee, I mean, like you talked about a little bit, you trace it all the way back to Kissinger and Mao, actually.
	I mean, how did we go from fighting communism in Vietnam to essentially funding and building up the Chinese Communist Party?
	You know, when did American elites decide that selling out American workers was worth it?
	I mean, it seems like a gradual buildup, but perhaps, you know, was there a particular thing that just started it and then it just kept going because they were greedy?
	I mean, I'll give Kissinger a little bit of credit.
	He was, you know, coming out of World War II and he saw the world in a different way.
	He believed in, you know, he believed in a balance of power.
	Now, it was misplayed terribly.
	One of the things that a lot of people don't know about, there's a transcript of that first meeting with Mao and Nixon and Kissinger and Zhou.
	And it's just terrible to read the transcript of that conversation.
	American statesman, the American president and his chief national security advisor, abasing himself to this communist tyrant who is responsible for tens of millions of deaths of his own people.
	It's just absolutely horrible.
	So everyone celebrated this.
	Everyone celebrated the opening.
	And very few people bear down and said, what does this actually mean?
	not just for us in terms of trade and not just in terms of national security, but what does it mean for the prestige and the fabric of our constitutional republic to be tying ourselves so closely to this disgusting, tyrannical, barbaric regime?
	And it's truly depressing, but their priorities were, their priorities were, it was the swamp.
	It's the corporate class is going in there and selling China's case to the political class.
	And the political class says, well, that sounds great.
	Make sure you leave the donation here.
	That's in short, precisely what happened.
	And it went on for decades.
	And the degradation, the degradation of America, again, it's not just how much the middle class was hurt, how much we lost our manufacturing base, which is supposed to be like one of the tests of any country's prestige.
	What does that country make?
	Well, as it turns out, in the 90s, people were saying, well, we don't really need to make anything.
	We can just be a service, a service economy, which was absolutely garbage.
	And you see where that's led us.
	So that's why it's so important when your father celebrates people like Tim Cook at the joint session of Congress in February saying, yes, Apple's moving some facilities back here.
	He's trying to get Americans back to the United States and make things here for Americans.
	Yeah, that was a big move.
	I mean, with Apple, you know, again, I've certainly been critical of a lot of big tech and a lot of that, but to start bringing some of that understanding that it's not all going to happen overnight, but even just to be able to start breaking those supply chains where we can't be dependent on them, whether there was the rare earth mineral issue, whether it's basically all of tech, whether it's our chips being manufactured solely in Taiwan, which is a great ally, but it's also 68 miles from China and not the easiest thing to defend.
	I mean, that's really important.
	It feels like the policies are working that these big guys that have for years taken advantage of the cheap labor and in fact very skilled labor there, while our guys stopped learning those skills and started getting gender studies degrees, those kids were learning science and manufacturing and building and getting real income and experience and a little bit of taste, again, of our American dream.
	What I want most from this is not just a decoupling from China, but I want sort of a restoration of American pride, whether it's workmanship, whether it's workmanship or making things, because that's what Elsa manufacturing base does.
	It's like, what do you make?
	What do you do?
	What is America known for?
	When we talk about Italy, we talk about Italian shoes.
	Germany, we might talk about cars.
	So what is America famous for building?
	And we've built great and wonderful things.
	The innovation and the invention of this country is amazing.
	So I want people to, especially younger men, we see a lot of them despondent about their, about not just about their futures, but about how they're being cheated out of the American dream by garbage like DEI.
	So that's what I really want to see.
	And I believe that that is an important part of your father's efforts against China to making America great again is also making people believe in the country and believing themselves.
	Yeah, no, it's a big deal.
	Like I said, it's great to see even a company like an Apple starting to do that.
	So it seems like the policies are working.
	We live in an instant gratification society.
	This is going to take time.
	You can't just build a manufacturing plant and put workers in it on day one.
	It doesn't work that way.
	Especially when you have our bureaucrats and policies, it takes you three years to be able to get the environmental impact statement done to be able to build a plant on sand.
	I mean, it's a little bit nuts, but it does seem like it's starting to work.
	And that's going to pay long-term benefits to our workers, to our citizens into the future, and help break us from that stranglehold that they have on us on our critical manufacturing.
	I think one of the big things is your father, you know, he's got a great team doing China stuff.
	He's got a great team around him.
	He's got a great team in the White House.
	I think if there's some way also to make sure that Americans understand what he's doing, because when people talk about China playing the long game, all they're talking about is what you're saying, that, you know, we want instant gratification in the United States and we elect a new leader every four years.
	I think it's very important that people understand that this is crucial, crucial to our freedom, crucial to the existence of the, you know, to the existence of our constitutional republic.
	So this stuff cannot go away after, you know, after January 20, 2029.
	It has to be at the front.
	This is what the struggle for our future looks like, and it's about the struggle.
	A lot of it is about the struggle with China.
	Yeah, no, I mean, I've been watching that a lot in the last couple of weeks.
	You see, a lot of the farmers are struggling right now or whatever it may be because China cuts it off.
	But it's terrible because these are our people and you want to do something.
	But again, nothing happens overnight.
	We can't keep the instant gratification side of these things where they'll do this anyway.
	It's sort of like the Democrats.
	They're like, we can't change the rules because then the Democrats will change the rules.
	No, no, no.
	If the Democrats can get an advantage in anything, they'll change the rules and do it.
	JD said that pretty well last week in one of his speeches when he was talking about just that.
	It's like, we got to do what we got to do.
	We got to do it for us.
	If there's a norm, whatever it is, the Democrats will break that the second there's an advantage.
	It's sort of the same with China.
	I mean, you know, but it's hard because I get it.
	You know, people can struggle in certain industries and certain places, but like none of these things can happen overnight.
	And we've gotten so accustomed to that.
	I think our electorate works that way.
	They make a lot of bad promises to get elected in two weeks.
	Then we got to live with the bad ideas, the bad policy for the next 50 years.
	And it just compounds and gets worse and it gets worse and it gets worse.
	And then you end up in a place like we are today.
	I think that your father must be walking a pretty fine line.
	I think he wants Americans to understand exactly this.
	He wants people to understand, look, this is tough.
	Xi's a tough negotiator, and this is really for the future of America.
	And on the other hand, as a negotiator, as someone who has to be tough, he can't give everything away.
	I've heard him talk about this before in all sorts of situations.
	Like, no, I'm not going to tell you.
	I'm not going to give away.
	I'm not going to give away all my plan, you know, all of the cards I have here at the table.
	But it is important, I think, for Americans to understand, right, it's been going on for 50 years.
	It's not going to be resolved overnight.
	So again, what we're going to see over the next three years is going to be more of this struggle.
	I believe there's going to be looking at the first term as an example.
	There will be more tariffs.
	There will be more threats of tariffs.
	I think the G will again threaten to go nuclear on the rare earth stuff.
	So it's a very difficult, delicate game.
	But in addition to what your father knew going into his first term, what he learned about G, what he learned about G, what he learned about G in the first term is amazing.
	And I think it's actually already having lots of effects.
	We saw just a couple of weeks ago how there's been some upheavals in the People's Liberation Army.
	I believe it was nine senior officials who were let go.
	And we don't know exactly the story behind that, but that shows instability.
	That shows an unstable regime.
	So that tells me, again, that the pressure coming from the White House, coming from this administration, is having some very serious effect on what's going on in Beijing.
	Lee, you write that my father, quote, shattered the illusion of a benign China.
	Can you expand on that a bit and then also maybe explain it in the context of the recent meeting with Xi?
	Because every president before him, Joe Biden most famously said, hey, folks, they're not bad and they're not going to eat our lunch.
	Every president before him, even Ronald Reagan, right, were talking about, they talked about how important the rise of China was to America's future.
	No, bringing the Communist Party of China into the global system, into the international trade regime, was a terrible thing for the United States.
	It was a terrible thing for the world.
	So again, it's just astonishing if you go back and I chart the history of what all these different presidents have said, how all these different administrations handled China and talked about China, and it was just a disaster.
	And they acted like that too, as though China was an honest broker.
	And finally, your father comes along and says, no, it's not.
	Look at the different things they're doing.
	Other people have talked about how the Chinese manipulate currency, but I have to do something about it.
	You know, that's another important thing that your father says in the interview.
	He said, you know, he said, I'm the only one who's ever done anything about it.
	And that's exactly right.
	Everyone else, whether they believed it, whether they just had to say it for their own donor base that they believed in a beneficent China, your father's the one who finally called them out.
	And that in itself is pressure, saying, I know what you're doing.
	I know what you're up to.
	I know you've hurt this country.
	Yeah, I mean, are there still people, even on the conservative side, that believe that they're acting in good faith, that China is actually not just trying to be the world's dominant force?
	Why would we see the hegemony that we've had with these bad policies for so long there?
	I mean, I can't imagine anyone, even with a straight face, and even if you're doing it to satisfy a donor base or something like that, actually believing it and continuing and perpetuating these policies that have clearly been disastrous for America, for our jobs, for our wages across the board.
	China has an enormous lobby.
	I mean, they pay people, of course, but there's something else as well, because so many American businesses want to get into China and some of them do get into China.
	The deal that Kissinger was the one who initiated this.
	The deal is this.
	The American companies, they get into China.
	Now, they might not be able to do much business in the Chinese market, but they'll go there and they'll manufacture.
	And that's where they make their killing.
	Manufacturing in China and exporting back to the United States.
	But the only companies that are allowed into China are the ones big enough or vocal enough that can project power, not just in Washington, but in state governments as well.
	So all of these different companies, American companies that do business in China, they come back and they put pressure on national figures, whether it's senators, congressmen, as well as local figures, local legislatures.
	I mean, it's all over the country.
	And finally, there are some states that have said, I believe it was Texas, who said, yeah, we cannot afford to have the Chinese Communist Party buying any more Texas land, certainly not near sensitive military facilities and other places.
	Yeah, it's always like food, supply chain, medicine, supply chain.
	I mean, it's very clear, clearly a power play to be able to cut us off from the critical necessities of life in America.
	And that people don't see that or wouldn't want to try to stop it is either incredibly stupid or incredibly malicious, and perhaps both.
	I mean, weirdly, it's not hard to believe.
	A lot of it's just greed.
	No, that is, by the way, you're right.
	But some of it is malevolent.
	I have to say, a lot of stuff on the left is actually quite malevolent.
	I'm not justifying what the Republican bad guys have done in this case, but when we see the left, when we see the different things that, for instance, Diane Feinstein, there's a long chapter on Dianne Feinstein and her husband.
	I mean, the cynicism and the cruelty.
	And, you know, the Chinese have used places like the Bay Area for a long time.
	I mean, it's a huge base of operations.
	But the different stories they've told to justify their position.
	And again, all it does, it's empowered this miserable regime.
	And, you know, I keep saying, of course, that's not a reflection of the Chinese people.
	It's about this terrible regime.
	And the people who have succeeded in this regime, they've crawled over the corpses of millions and millions of their own people.
	So there is no excuse for rationalizing what this regime is about.
	Lee, let's switch over a little bit to academia, right?
	American universities are apparently operating as an arm of Beijing's espionage network.
	I mean, major universities, including the Ivy Leagues, the University of Michigan, Stanford, so many others.
	How bad is that really?
	Are we basically training China's military intelligence apparatus in our own schools and then also bringing them over here to be professors?
	Yeah, it's terrible.
	I mean, I have a long section in there on the book, in the book, The China Matrix.
	You know, there's something about, I mean, Harvard's one of the worst.
	They arrested the head of, I believe it was the chemistry department, Charles Lieber.
	And this guy had been working for a Chinese spying program for years, taking money.
	He was also working in China itself, just amazing.
	Look, a lot of people got very concerned when your father was talking about, oh, I don't mind having 600,000 Chinese graduate students here.
	Well, I know that's not right because there are people who worked for your father in the first term.
	They were saying, no, the president, when he found out how many Chinese graduate students were here and how some of them were working in very sensitive research facilities like our nuclear labs, he was furious about it.
	And so I expect that in the second term that he is going to do something about it.
	When he said that about the 600,000 students, I interpreted that as I see a lot of the things that he says.
	It's part of a messaging campaign to Xi and to the Chinese Communist Party, and it's part of a negotiating tactic.
	And I try again when I hear that sort of stuff and when I talk to people, say, I wouldn't worry about it.
	President Trump is hugely informed about what's going on in this country, about the Chinese infiltration, the problems with China.
	He's talking right now.
	He's talking right now to Xi.
	When your father went after Iranian nuclear facilities, he's talking to Xi.
	When Venezuelan drug cartel boats are getting hit, he's talking to Xi.
	When he's talking about, well, what are we going to do with Ukraine and Russia?
	And I'm canceling my meeting with Putin.
	He's also addressing Xi.
	So that's how I see it too.
	It's a larger access.
	It's a larger, a larger, how do we put it, confederation of things that your father is concerned about.
	These are all part of the bigger China problem.
	Yeah, I mean, some of the biotech theft, I mean, some of the stuff they're studying, I mean, it's basically like, let's educate the people and let them be the leads in research in what could be the next Wuhan virus.
	And then I'm sure they're going to be honest brokers, even though we had ones a couple of months ago getting caught smuggling some of that sensitive data back and forth and into America.
	I mean, it's wild.
	I mean, from the academic standpoint, obviously they're probably paying full tuition or whatever it is.
	The schools are raking in those benefits.
	They're then taking the public funding as well and taxpayer dollars and they're exempt from ever paying back in.
	I mean, it's a it's a big Ponzi scheme, but are you are the academics just that naive that they, too, wouldn't care or is it?
	No, no.
	No, a lot of them.
	I mean, when we're talking about the STEM subjects, right?
	The STEM subjects, they don't care because, as you say, it's full tuition.
	And of course, the people who are coming are either either families of regime figures or they're being paid for by the regime.
	So this is all money that's being transferred directly, directly from the regime into universities.
	But remember the people who are often the heads of these universities, oftentimes these are leftists.
	And I have a long chapter in my book on the relationship between American leftists and the Chinese Communist Party.
	And so that's an enormous deal as well.
	That this is for a long time, the university, for decades now, the university has been a hotbed of pro-China activism.
	And so where they had these different, you know, the Confucius Institutes as well.
	I mean, these were basically outposts for Chinese intelligence.
	So we have a lot of people, a lot of people throughout the American elite, whether this is the media, whether this is the academy, whether this is the corporate sphere, tech, all these other things who are some of them, yeah, some of them it's just not money.
	Some of them are awfully sympathetic to the goals of China.
	We saw some of this during COVID.
	Yeah.
	How some of the people, they really liked, they really liked, they really started to emulate how the Chinese handle problems here, right?
	Just shut everyone down, shut them up, pen them up, and keep them at home until they start behaving better.
	So that's one of the terrible things, again, that's happened over the last 50 years.
	People were foolishly optimistic perhaps 50 years ago.
	Well, our relationship with China will encourage them to be more like us.
	They'll liberalize, they'll democratize.
	Exactly the opposite has happened.
	Our elite has become much more like the Chinese Communist Party.
	You know, the fentanyl crisis, it's killing 100,000 plus Americans a year.
	I mean, that's two Vietnam wars a year.
	I always use that as a stat because it just, you know, it was a bad war that took place over like 12 years.
	And I mean, it's two years.
	I have it in my book as well.
	You're exactly right between the amount of people that were killed.
	Look, the Chinese help killed Americans in Vietnam and they killed them directly in Korea.
	And so it's actually still a kinetic war.
	Fentanyl is killing Americans.
	You're absolutely right.
	Yeah, I mean, you connect it directly to the China matrix.
	I mean, this is literally chemical warfare that's going on.
	I mean, is this a major part of why perhaps my father is prioritizing our own hemisphere for a change rather than having seeded our own backyard while fighting wars in far off lands and places that don't share our values or that we even care about or have no national interest in?
	Absolutely.
	And this is part of closing the border.
	It's not just closing it to dangerous people.
	And a lot of bad actors from China have come, but it's also fentanyl.
	I mean, it's bad enough with the cocaine.
	It's bad enough with other things that are coming across the border.
	But I mean, a lot of this fentanyl is being snuck into stuff.
	I mean, we see all the terrible stories all the time.
	And your father talks about it, but these young kids who think they're ordering something, they think they're ordering something to help keep them up at night, studying for exams, right?
	And it turns out to be laced with fentanyl and they die.
	It's just, it's absolutely terrible.
	So this is an enormous issue.
	But yes, absolutely, this is part of China's war against the United States.
	And you looked, I mean, they run countless demoralization campaigns.
	If you see what happens on social media as well, they're doing it there.
	So the purpose is really to attack the fabric of the United States to destroy and to divide this country.
	And that's been going on for a very long time.
	Again, this is in my chapter about how the left, starting with groups like the Black Panthers, have been collaborating, coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party.
	Yeah, I mean, it also seems like they're a big part of the people pushing some of the civil unrest issues, you know, really adding a lot of fuel to the fire.
	I think they're the ones also pushing a lot of the trans nonsense, trying to just demoralize and, you know, indoctrinate our children into this insanity.
	I mean, that's clearly coming from them too, isn't it?
	Oh, there's, they're definitely pushing it.
	I mean, you know, we have progressive activists in this country, but yeah, definitely the Chinese are adding fuel to the fire.
	I mean, they're pushing a lot of that stuff on social media.
	And we see what it does to American teenagers, what it does to American families.
	I mean, it's absolutely insane.
	So, yes, they're doing that.
	They push a whole bunch of different narratives into our information ecosystem, you know, insane lies.
	And most of us, many of us are learning how to recognize these bad things right now.
	But it's all part of what people call China's unrestricted warfare against the United States.
	So they're doing it in every possible way.
	One of the arguments I make is that your father is focused on trade.
	He's focused on the trade deficit because that's how China can afford to do lots of these different things.
	So when people are worried about Taiwan, as this administration definitely is, and we urge the Taiwanese to spend more on their defense, and they've boosted their defense for 2026, they'll be spending more than $30 billion.
	But that's a tenth of what China's trade surplus with us is like.
	There's no way that Taiwan can keep up with this.
	Yeah, we're paying for their military industrialization.
	Exactly.
	It's insane.
	So that's what people need.
	That's the other thing I think that people really need to understand about your father's tariff regime.
	It's like, we can't have a country like this.
	We are paying.
	We are paying for Chinese weapon systems that are pointed at American cities.
	We're paying for PLA soldiers who are training to kill Americans and American allies.
	This is absolutely nuts.
	We can't keep doing it.
	That's why the trade war is so important for your father.
	But the way I understand it is the trade war, what people are calling the trade war, is part of a much larger conflict that your father understands, unlike few people, unlike no one before him, and unlike few people now.
	Leo, I'm kind of curious, you know, where does the China story start for you?
	What motivated you to cover this so extensively?
	Yeah, your father, actually.
	I mean, you know, I wrote the plot against the president.
	So my subject has been, you know, U.S. American corruption.
	I'm not a China scholar.
	What interested me about this story was the extent of the American corruption.
	And it was really, again, it was your father pointing to this in his first term saying, this is so bad.
	This is corrupt.
	And then once I started to understand the extent of it, like, this is mind-blowing.
	And so what it is, it's not just, you know, it's not just crunching numbers, this book.
	It's really a story about how terrible things have been done to this country, mostly by Americans.
	The biggest problem, finally, is not the Chinese Communist Party.
	It's the Americans who have partnered with them and who've gotten rich off of them.
	So those are the bad guys.
	Your father is the protagonist of the story.
	He's the hero.
	He's the one who says, this is terrible.
	Something has to be done about this.
	And I'm the guy to do it.
	So really, that's what got me interested in it.
	And I know that's true with a lot of other people too.
	A lot of other people, Republicans, and there are some Democrats as well, people on the left as well, who are upset by this relationship.
	But it was really your father as president who highlighted this and said, this is a threat to us.
	On that same note, Lee, what are some of the common themes or perhaps overlapping ideas between your work in the plot against the president and this book?
	Are there common threads or parallels there?
	Well, I mean, one of the things that I realized, one of the things that I realized partly through interviewing your father, I started to see Russia Gate actually as a plot not just to undo your father and to cripple his administration, his first administration, but also as an effort to cover for China, right?
	You had all these different people who are coming together and part of it is their madness, their insanity.
	But once I started seeing who was attacking him, right, from the different industries, from the different places, and it wasn't just the political left.
	There were lots of other people involved as well, media, culture, everyone who has a stake, whose power, whose wealth and prestige is staked to the Chinese Communist Party.
	I'm like, of course, that's a large part of the purpose of RussiaGate, to keep President Donald Trump off his toes so he can't focus on China.
	And your father relays a time when he was speaking to Vladimir Putin.
	And President Trump says, you know, it would have been too bad because it would have been interesting to have explored a relationship to see if we could do anything with Putin.
	But of course, we couldn't because of RussiaGate.
	So Russagate did tremendous damage to American national security.
	I remember that was one of the things your father told me too.
	He's like, yeah, it's nut.
	These people are trying to cause problems with Russia.
	This is a world power with an enormous nuclear arsenal and they're playing with fire.
	I'm like, yeah.
	So that's how they intersect.
	I mean, really, RussiaGate was in large part an effort to keep your father from focusing on China.
	And even then, the amount of focus he was able to devote to China is amazing.
	But it would have been greater were it not for RussiaGate.
	Oh, yeah.
	I mean, I'm sure that was pushed by them a lot and clearly also the Democrats with their Trump derangement syndrome.
	But that was a way to take up a sizable percentage of his bandwidth.
	And not many people work harder than my father.
	Not many people sleep less.
	Not many people are more motivated to get that.
	Certainly not in government bureaucracies.
	But that was definitely a way to distract him from being able to accomplish more in his first term.
	It is amazing, though, when I think about it.
	When I think about RussiaGate, the madness, and I wrote the plot against the president and then the permanent coup and the disappearing of the president, all about Russia Gate.
	When I think about how much Russia gate, the madness and insanity of it, and then I realize that during that entire time, your father is also fighting this conflict against the People's Republic of China, an enormous trade war, tariffs, all these other things.
	Like, how did he manage to do this at all?
	It's just amazing.
	And he had a very good China team, a lot of people who did very good work on China.
	So that team helped.
	People like Bob Lighthiser, you know, they were all extremely talented people.
	But again, just thinking, wow, they really tried to block him from China, but he was able to still get a tremendous amount of stuff done on that.
	So Lou, in your opinion, what are the benchmarks for U.S. success with China?
	You know, when we look back decades from now, what will be the signs of winning?
	Yeah, I think a lot of it will have to do with, I think a lot of it will have to do with restoring American manufacturing, as I said before, and who's coming back.
	Some of these jobs, some of them will not be jobs.
	Some of them will be done by automation, but those are still going to mean jobs for American workers.
	So I think a large part is going to have to do with the different jobs that are coming back.
	I think a lot of it is going to one of the big markers, the benchmarks, is going to be what our trade balances look like with China and with the rest of the world.
	I think some of it in the future.
	I think that this Communist Party is extremely brittle.
	I think that your father, he's not doing regime change, but I think he's, I think their response to him, I think it's an unstable regime right now.
	So I think those are important.
	I think those are important markers.
	But again, the other thing is the pride in our country, because really the Chinese have jumped on this demoralization campaign.
	And whether it has to do with Fentinel or whether it has to do with people hating America or distrusting America or not believing anything anymore about America, and this is unfortunately afflicting the right as well as the left.
	So I think also it's a matter of restoring national pride, how we feel about our country, how deeply we love our country, our pride and prestige.
	These things are all at stake.
	And I know that people will, you know, they'll be able to feel those sorts of things in their heart.
	Just as I think that people are extremely happy right now that your father is leading us against China.
	Yeah, I mean, talk a little bit about, because you started talking about some of the things as it related to China and the economy.
	You know, it's always hard to gauge numbers because they put out numbers, but it's backed by bad data.
	They try to make themselves look, you know, how much of sort of that strength of China is real versus sort of a house of cards?
	You know, you've seen what goes on sort of there in the real estate markets.
	Yeah.
	Well, that's very interesting.
	You talk about the real estate market because for, you know, we remember for decades that you would see these giant massive cities in China.
	It's like, wow, that's really impressive.
	But no one lived in them, right?
	No one lived in them.
	And the fact is that people were investing in these buildings that no one lived in.
	So there's a very impressive facade that you'll see people talk about all the time, including Americans.
	Oh, look at the speed, the bullet trains, and this and that, and how well everything is done in China.
	It's a communist regime.
	Again, it's extremely brittle.
	If you look at the regime itself, the way it's structured, the way it's structured with a strongman on the top.
	So what do they have around it?
	What are the people like?
	We are a constitutional republic, extremely resilient.
	We have a lot of problems, but that's sort of built in the system, how we fight these things out, how we figure these things out.
	So I think just the basic fundamentals makes the United States so much stronger.
	People talk about the People's Liberation Army.
	You might remember a couple of years ago when they had those videos of when those videos of PLA soldiers doing acrobatic trips and flipping around and doing this and that.
	Like, oh, wow, we have problems with our DEI Pentagon.
	This was before Pete Hegseth got there.
	Well, a friend of mine who had served in a very hard-charging U.S. military unit and he'd spent some time working on China stuff.
	He said, yeah, people understand the Chinese military is actually pretty soft.
	And what they have to, because they had that one-child policy for so long, and all of these moms babied their son so much.
	So a lot of it is toughening up, trying to toughen up Chinese men.
	But the Chinese play it very well that, oh, no, no, it's actually very tough.
	And so once you understand what's behind it or what's beneath it, you have a very different picture of this Communist Party.
	That's really interesting.
	Where can people find your book, Lee?
	From Center Streets, published by Center Street Books.
	So it's great when people order it directly from my great publisher, Center Street.
	But of course, they can find it on Amazon and Barnes and Noble as well.
	Well, I really appreciate it, guys.
	Make sure to check out the China Matrix.
	Lee, you know, fascinating stuff.
	I mean, I guess, you know, the last question perhaps I'd have is, you know, to the point of what we were just talking about, you know, maybe it's not as stable.
	Maybe there's some generals leaving.
	But with the advent of AI and sort of the social contracts that they have out there, could you ever actually have a real revolution against these existing governments?
	Or does the AI and the monitoring of people, does it prevent there from ever being a critical mass of people to actually fight back against this?
	And so you're locked into this system because the second there's a little bit of a little bit of a flare-up, a little bit of an uprising, they're just pulled out of the system, which would cause any of that momentum to die.
	It's an enormous surveillance state.
	And again, to come back to COVID, this is one of the things that worried a lot of us during COVID.
	And we see this all the time now with the amount, you know, the amount of surveillance that Republicans were put in under the Biden administration with Arctic Frost.
	So it's an enormous surveillance state, and they keep very close tabs on people.
	But this regime is spread so thinly.
	They're at war with so many different populations.
	They're at war with Tibetans.
	They're at war with the Uyghurs.
	They're at war with the Salun Gong movement.
	There are so many different people that they are fighting right now as well.
	They have to fight democracy activists as well.
	So I mean, it shows, again, it shows, I keep referring to the brittleness of this regime.
	But also, yeah, I mean, I think we have to hope that people will, I mean, it's one of the world's great civilizations.
	And I think that we'd all like to see it return to that and shrug off this miserable communist regime.
	But we hope that for so many other places around the world, too.
	We look at what's happening in the United Kingdom.
	We look at what's happening in Europe.
	And so I think as Americans, as Americans, we have to be hopeful.
	We see how we were all feeling during the Joe Biden years.
	It was miserable.
	How can we get through this?
	Will we get through it?
	And between a combination of God, fate, and your father's fortitude, here we are.
	We're in a different place.
	You actually, off topic, but I think important.
	You mentioned Operation Arctic Frost, the government, the FBI spying on 20% of Democrats, Republican senators, literally wiretaps against conservative organizations.
	I mean, this sounds an awfully lot like China.
	It sounds incredibly scary.
	It was happening.
	We now have those facts.
	There's no outrage from the mainstream media.
	If it was the other way around, I think it'd be a really big problem.
	What do you see happening there?
	Is there ever accountability to these people that are clearly breaking the law and going against one side on a politically biased witch hunt?
	I mean, this sounds just the extension of the plot against the president.
	It's just the plot against anyone who happens to not be a Democrat.
	Well, you know, the subtitle of Plot Against the President was the biggest political scandal in U.S. history.
	And I believe that Russia Gate is the template for all of these different operations and campaigns targeting your father, his aides, and his supporters.
	But Arctic Frost is just enormous.
	I mean, it's just, I mean, they went after truth social, right?
	They went after so many things.
	And look, the way that I see it is the people your father put in place, like Cash, Battelle, like Pam Bondi, this is the best shot at accountability we'll have.
	I mean, certainly Cash.
	I mean, Cash knows, Cash knows the details of Russia Gate, and he'll know the details of Arctic Frost better than anyone.
	So we need accountability.
	We have to have, yeah, we have to have indictments and we need convictions as well.
	Because the only way that people in the future, the argument I make is the only way that people in the future will understand what happened is for there to be convictions, for people to be led away in orange jumpsuits, because the press can spin this any way they want until those people are convicted.
	Then they have to say, well, here's what that guy is accused of doing.
	They're preserving democracy.
	They were fighting against the totalitarian fascist regime.
	I mean, give me a break, but like they can write that in the opinion pieces.
	But when they write the news pieces, they can't say that they charged five years for preserving democracy.
	They have to actually give a real reason.
	And we need that because what concerns me is not just where we are now, but our children and grandchildren.
	Don, I know you lived in New York too.
	I did.
	I can't bear the thought that New York City schoolchildren are likely to be taught for the next century that the 45th and 47th president of the United States is a Russian spy.
	But unless there's real accountability, that these guys are held responsible by the criminal justice system, it terrifies me to say so, but that's what I think we're going to wind up with.
	So there has to be accountability.
	Well, Lee, I really appreciate it.
	Guys, check out all of Lee's books, The Plot Against the President.
	Check out the China Matrix.
	You got a bunch of others.
	But Lee, thank you so much for being here.
	Really, really important stuff.
	And I'm sure as we start hearing more about all of these issues coming, we'll have to have you back on and talk about it again.
	I look forward to it, Dom.
	Thanks so much again for the great talk today.
	Thanks, my friend.
	Be well.
	Guys, thanks so much for tuning in.
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