Russia Sours on Trump, But China Is Thrilled

From David Remnick of the New Yorker:

If you talk to people in Moscow now, there’s a lot of buyer’s remorse. There was an order sent down to Russian television, “enough with the celebrating about Trump!”

From the Wall Street Journal on the White House barring disliked reporters from a briefing last week:

China Gloats as Trump Squanders U.S. Soft Power

To Chinese propagandists, the widely criticized White House move was a cause for glee—and another example of Donald Trump playing into China’s hands. For almost seven decades, the U.S. has championed a liberal order in the Asia-Pacific….Today, America’s ideological shift, part of a populist backlash to globalization, threatens to undermine Washington’s position in a region it transformed.

To the extent that the Trump White House closes the country’s borders to immigrants, raises the specter of trade tariffs, or impedes the operations of a free press—even when those restrictions have no equivalence in the repression that Chinese journalists suffer—it creates an opportunity for Beijing.

So Russia put in all this work to elect Trump, and the big winner is…China. Nice work, Vlad.