What we'll say when we look back on the Donald Trump presidency

Beijing, 20 January 2018.

Top Secret and Strictly Restricted.

From: Sun Wukong, Director for Special Operations, Ministry of State Security

To: Comrade Geng Huichang, Minister of State Security

CC: Comrade President Xi Jinping; Comrade Premier Li Keqiang. No further circulation.

Subject: Operation Queen of Diamonds

As requested by the esteemed comrades, I respectfully submit a brief memorandum on the effectiveness of Operation Queen of Diamonds. At the highest levels of the Party and State, it is agreed that this undertaking has met with spectacular success. A year after the inauguration of Comrade Donald Trump – informally known among us as the “Manchurian Candidate” – as President of the United States, he has advanced the long-term strategic aims of the People’s Republic of China beyond our furthest expectations. We salute Comrade Donald, and his many helpers in the media, political and business communities of the US, for their invaluable assistance to the People’s Republic – whether or not they know it was tendered. However, it has become increasingly clear that the potential dangers of Queen of Diamonds have begun to outweigh its benefits. In the circumstances, your Director of Special Operations humbly suggests that the time has come to eliminate this risk.

Comrade Donald first came to our attention as a result of his companies’ alleged connections, via large-scale construction projects in New York and Atlantic City, with figures of judicial interest such as Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo, Salvatore Testa, Paul Castellano and Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno. Later events strengthened our belief that he might be of future use, including the Chapter 11 bankruptcy of several major hotel, resort and casino enterprises. We envisaged a short-term association founded on our mutual pursuit of business ventures unimpeded by excessive red tape.

However, the unanticipated success of his presidential run entirely transformed the picture. Esteemed comrades will recall that, in late 2015, the ascent of Trump in the polls delivered a windfall beyond our wildest dreams. We had sought to weaken and discredit the global influence of the United States, especially as a self-appointed champion of “democracy” and “human rights” according to the bourgeois definition of those terms. At the same time, challenges in our domestic economy mandated a continuing close relationship with American banks, corporations and consumers. We needed to disgrace and silence the US, but not quite to ruin it. No thoughtful comrade has, since the 1960s, considered military action as a sensible option. So-called “cyber warfare”, the weapon of choice over the past decade, had begun to attract too much specialist attention from Western intelligence agencies.

In this climate, the rise of Comrade Donald arrived like a gift from heaven. Please forgive me if I repeat an over-familiar piece of advice from Sun Tzu: “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” True, we also made use of the stealth that Sun Tzu recommends to undermine other campaigns within the Republican faction. We remember with pleasure the manner in which Ben Carson was induced to claim that the Archangel Gabriel would be joining him at a rally in Des Moines, Iowa, while Ted Cruz agreed to demand the wholesale demolition of Brooklyn, Palo Alto and New Orleans to facilitate tax-free fracking explorations. As for the rival Democratic faction and its figurehead Hillary Clinton, congratulations are in order for our Operation Whitewater Revisited. Deploying the taint of past financial scandals, it reduced her poll ratings by 10 per cent in spring 2016. Her troubles encouraged Senator Bernie Sanders to stand as an Independent Social Democrat for president, and so divide the non-Republican vote.

Even so, our “Manchurian Candidate” won only narrowly on 8 November 2016. He took 27 states to Clinton’s 22, with Sanders victorious in Vermont, but only 45.7 per cent of the popular vote. In their wisdom, the Founding Fathers concurred with our own leaders about the inadvisability of direct elections to high office. It was still enough. We note in passing that the insertion of Mel Gibson as vice-presidential candidate proved a master-stroke.

Without any external prompting, Trump’s keynote policies buttressed his core support, bitterly divided his nation and sowed alarm among the Western allies. We knew in advance about the promise to fortify the entire southern border of the US with the “Mexican Anti-Rapist and Drug-Pusher Wall”. In fact, we had much the same idea 2,200 years ago. More surprising, but predictable to shrewd observers, was the plan for a network of Muslim Holding Camps, humanely supervised by the International Red Cross, in which US citizens of Muslim origin would be required to undergo re-education programmes before release back into the community. Again, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Those building projects offered millions of new blue-collar jobs. Comrades may permit themselves a degree of quiet satisfaction at Trump’s evident respect for the methods of our late, beloved Chairman.

We had not scheduled other policy platforms. The call to invade Scotland, once a trusted ally of Trump’s business empire but lately accused of betrayal, came out of the blue – as did the proposal to rename it as Golf Course One. In the aftermath, Comrade Trump planned to style himself King Donald IV. We took no public stance on such neo-feudal follies, but warned against any unnecessary antagonism of our long-term clients in England.

Once in office, the Comrade President moved to implement his programme with commendable speed. The immediate shutdown of the “Obamacare” health plan in order to fund a ground attack in Syria triggered destabilising protests across the US, and attacks on its embassies around the world. When, in April 2017, construction began on the Mexican Wall and a series of Muslim Camps, support for US policy evaporated in the Middle East and Latin America. Given the volatility of the Russian leadership, I am glad to report that many nations looked further east to find a new, more stable partner. Mass high-level resignations from the State Department and diplomatic corps ensued at a gratifying rate. Meanwhile, cuts in federal taxes, allied to the bulk creation of jobs in building walls, camps and jails, flung the US economy’s door wide open again to our manufactured goods. Trump, a free-trade advocate, has done nothing to impede them.

That much fell within our plans. Elsewhere, we adopted a position of benign neutrality on Trump’s domestic innovations. The compulsory carrying of firearms in schools, colleges and federal offices galvanised the home-grown small-arms industry. It also led to a lucrative upsurge in the workload of private hospitals and mortuaries. Some of these policies did not accord with our way of government. The appointment of senior officials through the kind of televised tasks seen on Trump’s show The Apprentice would not find favour in China.

As you may know, the Secretary of the Treasury won his post after he set up a profitable hot-dog stand in Yonkers. The Commandant of the US Marine Corps achieved his appointment by drilling the most glamorous team of cheerleaders at Super Bowl 51 in Houston, Texas. Still, it is of limited interest to the People’s Republic if Trump chooses to hand over the premises of the New York Metropolitan Opera to the Grand Ole Opry of Nashville, or to re-brand Harvard University as the Massachusetts Seminary for American Faith. We voiced greater concern over the decision to give officers of the CIA and FBI a majority of votes on the boards of Apple, Microsoft and Amazon. Nonetheless, such measures helpfully quickened the flow of skilled defectors in our direction.

Yet the early months of the Trump administration proved too good to last. After incentives replaced menaces, massive investment in the “fairway economy” secured him the title of King Donald IV in Scotland. Comrade Osborne and our faithful servants in London raised no objection, while a guarantee of so-called “independence” for the restored monarchy proved sufficient to gain the consent of the provincial assembly in Edinburgh. The crown nurtured Trump’s hubris. It should have been obvious that he would quickly overreach himself.

It pains me to inform you that our agents in the field had no prior warning of the threats to invade Canada that began in October 2017. You will know that, while accusing premier Justin Trudeau of leading an “Islamo-Bolshevist rogue state”, the Commander-in-Chief has assembled around 100,000 troops at strategic border locations from Buffalo and Detroit to Seattle. Trump claims that Canada has “Muslim-Welfarist” weapons of mass destruction, allegedly derived from enriched maple syrup, hidden in the Arctic region of Nunavut, and ready for deployment within 45 minutes. In return for a commitment to stand down his forces, he has now demanded from Trudeau the permanent handover of 80 per cent of Canadian oil and gas reserves to US-domiciled companies.

I regret that there may be method in his madness. No doubt, we should have foreseen such an eventuality. So I have with some reluctance come to the conclusion that we must put an end to this fruitful but unstable experiment. We have, of course, the means in place in Washington to terminate Operation Queen of Diamonds. Rest assured that both principals in this affair, President and Vice-President, would find themselves instantly trumped. Respected comrades, I humbly request that you now grant me permission to play our ace.”