(New York Post)
Trump publicly praised Chinese youth for being well-behaved after encountering them during diplomatic dealings. The New York Post opinion piece argues his reaction reveals something real about the contrast between Chinese and American youth culture.
Trump saw some Chinese kids sit quietly with their hands folded or whatever and now he can’t stop talking about it. That’s the whole story. That’s the entire origin point of this geopolitical observation.
And you know what, I get it. I was at a Cheesecake Factory in Burbank last month and watched a nine-year-old throw a full bread basket at his dad because it wasn’t sourdough. Dad apologized to the kid. That happened. I was there.
American children are feral and everyone knows it and nobody wants to say it out loud because somewhere a parenting influencer will make a forty-minute video about how that’s actually a sign of “healthy boundary formation.” It is not healthy boundary formation. It is a child throwing bread at a grown man in a Cheesecake Factory.
Trump, a seventy-nine-year-old billionaire who raised his own children mostly by pointing at them from a helicopter, watched some kids in Beijing sit still for six minutes and declared it a national crisis. Shockingly, he is not wrong.
The bar is in the earth’s core and Chinese kids cleared it like it was nothing, and now we’re having a whole national conversation. I need to lie down.
