Ranking Member Raskin’s Opening Remarks During Hearing on China and Autocratic Threats to Democracy
Washington, D.C. (September 24, 2024)—Below is Ranking Member Jamie Raskin’s opening statement at today’s full committee hearing examining the Biden-Harris Administration’s strategy to counter China and other authoritarian threats to democracy and national security by investing in American competitiveness and innovation.
Opening Statement
Ranking Member Jamie Raskin
Committee on Oversight and Accountability
“Defending America from the Chinese Communist Party’s Political Warfare, Part III”
September 24, 2024
All the dictators and despots of the world have something in common in 2024.
They are united in trying to subvert democracy in America and they are engaged indeed in “political warfare” against us, as the title of this hearing has it. The vicious autocrats of Russia, the police-state theocrats of Iran, the totalitarian Communist billionaire bureaucrats of China and North Korea, and all their oligarchs and plutocrats seek to destroy the very idea of human rights and political freedom that are the defining ideals and values of our nation and still the hope of a world struggling against their oppression.
The tyrants have something else in common: Donald Trump. He loves them all and they love him back. He loves them because he envies their total control over their societies, and they love him because they know they can manipulate and control him. He praises all of them—Putin, Orbán, Xi, Kim Jong Un. Trump exults in their friendship and emulates their control over what he calls “their people.”
When he was President, Trump said that he and Xi, the President of China and Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, “love each other” and Trump called Xi a “brilliant” man. He openly envied and marveled over Xi’s total control over “his people” and saying, “he controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist.” And when people asked questions about Xi and the CCP’s role at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, Trump repeatedly defended Xi and praised his “excellent” leadership, calling him a “brilliant man,” “smart,” “brilliant,” “everything perfect, “we love each other,” “President Xi, who is a friend of mine, who’s very smart,” “very good man,” “nobody like that.” “The look, the brain, the whole thing,” “my feeling toward you is an incredibly warm one,” he said.
Trump has repeatedly praised Russia’s lawless and bloody invasion of Ukraine as “smart.” At a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser in 2022, Trump gushed that Putin was “taking over a country—really a vast, vast location, a great piece of land with a lot of people, and just walking right in.” At the presidential debate earlier this month, Trump refused to say that he wanted Ukraine to win the war but said he would end the war in 24 hours, meaning he would, per usual, cave in to Putin’s propaganda and outrageous demands and cede large parts of Ukraine to the Russian strongman who imprisons, poisons and murders his political opponents.
Trump’s Chief of Staff John Kelly described his own boss as “a person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.”
And to quote his chilling 2018 comments to Fox News about Kim Jong Un, Trump said, “He’s the head of a country and I mean he is the strong head. Don’t let anyone think anything different. He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”
Trump openly catered to Putin, defended the former KGB Chief and aggressively took his side against the NSA, the CIA, the DIA, the FBI, and more than a dozen other U.S. intelligence agencies which found that Putin was engaged in active espionage, sabotage and interference in the 2016 American presidential election, a form of shocking appeasement that invited further Russian aggression in 2020 and now again in the 2024 presidential campaign.
H.R. McMaster, Trump’s former National Security Advisor, recounted a meeting between Chinese President Xi and then-President Trump. According to McMaster, Xi “ate our lunch” because Trump madly ingratiated himself to Xi and completely failed to stand up for U.S. foreign policy interests.
McMaster writes that Trump frequently revealed his “affinity for strongmen” and “belief that he alone could forge a good relationship with Putin.”
As President, according to his own National Security Advisor, John Bolton, Trump encouraged President Xi’s building and use of concentration camps to hold Uyghurs in Xinjiang province.
In the 2024 campaign, Trump has promised to follow the lead of these dictators in the global axis of autocrats. A convicted felon and adjudicated sexual assailant, Trump repeatedly says he would suspend the rule of law in America, override the Constitution as dictator on “Day One,” launch the biggest mass detention and internment of immigrants in American history, and replace tens of thousands of professional civil servants with political loyalists and personal sycophants he craves. He has pledged to use the Department of Justice as a weapon to investigate and prosecute his political enemies.
And he’s not kidding. He packed and stacked the Supreme Court to destroy a fundamental constitutional right women enjoyed for more than a half-century in America. He personally ordered the weaponization of the DOJ and the IRS against Hillary Clinton, his own FBI director James Comey, his own Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, his private lawyer for years Michael Cohen, who was put in solitary confinement for two weeks when he refused to promise he would not write a book about Donald Trump and was released by a federal judge who was shocked by the blatantly vindictive and unconstitutional persecution of an American citizen for exercising his First Amendment rights.
Putin, Xi, Trump, and Hungary’s tyrant Victor Orbán —who had a slumber party at Mar-a-Lago when he was in town promoting illiberal democracy, which means mob rule without rights and freedom—are the new axis of autocrats attacking American democracy and freedom and human rights all over the world.
This is the real “political warfare” taking place against America. After repeatedly caving in to China and cheerleading its destruction of human rights, after making sure his own daughter received more than 40 trademarks from China and the CCP, after praising Xi’s “great” performance in COVID-19, Trump decided it might be to his political advantage to attack China in with juvenile racist slurs and nicknames. Scandalously, he has lumped Chinese Americans and immigrants in with the atrocities of the CCP when it is the Chinese diaspora in the United States that is actually most at risk for transnational repression and brutalization by the CCP.
Trump’s laughable decision to pose as a critic of Chinese government oppression resembles nothing so much as Orwell’s depiction in 1984 of a friendly shifting competition between authoritarian powers, Oceana, Eastasia and Eurasia, who pretend to be rivals but actually form an axis of oppression against their own peoples who they seek to dominate.
Contrary to this craven submission to foreign dictators and make-believe, the Biden-Harris Administration and Democrats in Congress have taken a strong stand for democracy against all the autocrats and totalitarians, including the CCP, responding aggressively to the economic, security, and ideological challenges posed by China, including by investing in our competitiveness, our innovation, and our democracy.
Under President Biden, the U.S. has aligned its efforts with those of our allies and partners around the globe, bringing together the democracies of the world. President Biden strengthened military partnerships with allies across the Indo-Pacific and established the Australia, United Kingdom, United States—or AUKUS—security pact to help defend peace, democracy and stability in the region.
The Biden-Harris Administration has also prioritized ensuring that America can compete with—and indeed outcompete—China economically as well as geopolitically. Historic legislation passed by Congressional Democrats and signed into law by President Biden, including the Inflation Reduction Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the CHIPS and Science Act, are enabling the U.S. to create over a million jobs in strategically significant sectors through the next decade and to secure domestic supply chains for critical resources—something Donald Trump never got around to doing.
Today, the Democrats will explain how the Biden-Harris Administration has guaranteed that America can compete with and indeed outcompete China economically as well as geopolitically while we stand up for the ideals of human rights and democracy for all.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.