× Using the app on a browser? Install by clicking "Add to Homescreen" on your Android or Apple device browser options to enjoy the full experience.
[If you are using Chrome on a desktop or Android, CLICK HERE to install the app]
Live
Yesterday
Understand
Search
Donate

Opinion: 14 minutes to obliterate Hong Kong: deconstructing Donald Trump’s bizarre boast

APPEAL: We need your help to run the site.
  • We don’t charge our readers as we believe that free access to news is a universal right
  • We are committed to bringing you unbiased news.
Big or small, every reader contribution is so precious, even $1 helps greatly. Thank you. Make a contribution.

14 minutes to obliterate Hong Kong: deconstructing Donald Trump’s bizarre boast

Yonden Lhatoo breaks down the US president’s astonishing claim that he stopped his Chinese counterpart from wiping out the protest-torn city with a million PLA troops

Ridiculing Donald Trump is too easy. There’s more than enough of that going on already, and it’s become an exercise in futility because America’s 45th president is who he is, will say what he will say, and will do what he will do.

But let’s just pause for a minute, for the benefit of Hong Kong’s anti-China revolution and its US-flag-waving warriors, and deconstruct their great white saviour’s latest message to them.

“If it weren’t for me, Hong Kong would have been obliterated within 14 minutes,” Trump boasted in a phone interview on Fox & Friends, his audiovisual Wikipedia of world news. Chinese President Xi Jinping “has got a million soldiers standing outside of Hong Kong that aren’t going in only because I asked him, please don’t do that”.

Any willing suspension of disbelief hits a snag right away when he claims a million PLA troops are all revved up at the border, poised to pounce on Hong Kong, with only his magnanimous eminence preventing them from wiping us all out, apparently.

Don’t Americans get it? The PLA is already here, in strategic locations across the city, confined to barracks, as it has been for more than two decades since the handover to Chinese sovereignty.