Wait -- Maybe It's Significant?

Click here for my earlier post, entitled "Hey, It's Just A Phone Call - Right?" That was a comment on how Trump's team was trying to downplay the significance of Trump's Taiwan phone call. Now, apparently, it's just the opposite: This has been a highly choreographed rollout of a strategy that has been carefully planned during "months of quiet preparations and deliberations among Trump’s advisers."

And if you think "Trump's advisers" really believed, months ago, that Trump was going to win and were laying plans for the great day, Chris Christie has a bridge to sell you.

According to the article, "Several leading members of Trump’s transition team are considered hawkish on China and friendly toward Taiwan, including incoming chief of staff Reince Priebus."

"It was planned weeks ahead by staffers and Taiwan specialists on both sides, according to people familiar with the plans." Okay, "weeks"; now we're getting somewhere.

Immediately after Trump won the Nov. 8 election, his staffers compiled a list of foreign leaders with whom to arrange calls. “Very early on, Taiwan was on that list,” said Stephen Yates, a national security official during the presidency of George W. Bush and an expert on China and Taiwan. “Once the call was scheduled, I was told that there was a briefing for President-elect Trump. They knew that there would be reaction and potential blowback.”

Stephen Yates, Idaho GOP chairman and former deputy national security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney. Remember that name.

At the Republican National Convention in July, Trump’s allies [including Yates] inserted a little-noticed phrase into the party’s platform reaffirming support for six key assurances to Taiwan made by President Ronald Reagan in 1982 — a priority for the Taiwan government. Also written into the 2016 platform was tougher language about China than had been in the party’s platform in its previous iteration four years ago.

“We salute the people of Taiwan, with whom we share the values of democracy, human rights, a free market economy, and the rule of law,” the platform said, adding that the current documents governing U.S.-Taiwan relations should stand but adding, “China’s behavior has negated the optimistic language of our last platform concerning our future relations with China.”

Apparently Trump is playing to his base:

During the campaign, Trump’s fiery rhetoric against China resonated with his supporters, especially those in the economically beleaguered Rust Belt states where he registered unexpected wins. Trump accused China of “raping” the United States by stealing trade secrets, manipulating its currency and subsidizing its industries. He vowed to institute tough new policies designed to crack down on the Chinese and extract concessions, such as by imposing higher tariffs on goods manufactured there.

By irritating if not angering the Chinese government with his talk with Tsai, Trump showed his core supporters in the United States that he would follow through with his promise to get tough on China, some observers said.

Perhaps you consider Trump's "core supporters" to be Steve Bannon, Reince Preibus, John Bolton, Stephen Yates, Nigel Farage, former Heritage Foundation president Ed Feulner, and a group of China hawks now holed up in Trump Tower; personally, I don't think Trump's core supporters know any more about Taiwan and the one-China policy than Trump does, which is next to nothing. Of course, they do understand when Trump says "USA good, China bad."

Gordon Chang, an Asia expert and author of “ The Coming Collapse of China ,” said Trump’s tweet Friday night that he had just accepted a call from Tsai was “not credible.”

“This has all the hallmarks of a prearranged phone call,” Chang said. “It doesn’t make sense that Tsai out of the blue would call Donald Trump. She is not known for taking big leaps into the unknown, and it would be politically embarrassing when it was learned that she called Trump and he would not take her call.”

I agree: While Trump is a know-nothing, easily manipulated by the partisan politicos around him, rest assured that Taiwan's president, Tsai Ing-wen, is not.