The New York Times is fretting that financial ties to and business transactions in China are very troublesome . . . for Elon Musk:

With his deal to take over Twitter, Mr. Musk’s ties to China are about to get even more fraught.
Like all foreign investors in China, he operates Tesla at the pleasure of the Chinese authorities, who have shown a willingness to influence or punish companies that cross political red lines. Even Apple, the world’s most valuable company, has given in to Chinese demands, including censoring its App Store.
Mr. Musk’s extensive investments in China could be at risk if Twitter upsets the Communist Party state, which has banned the platform at home but used it extensively to push Beijing’s foreign policy around the globe — often with false or misleading information.

Hmm. That got me to thinking: I know of a certain president of the United States whose family has had deep financial ties and lucrative business transactions with people tightly connected to “the Communist Party state.” And that’s under circumstances where the family scored those ties because of that certain president of the United States, even hitched a ride on Air Force Two to cut one of the deals, and where a credible witness said that, in 2017, this now-president of the United States had face-to-face meetings with him about the deal and was supposed to get a 10 percent cut.

In fact, in connection with said deal, the president’s family got about $5 million from its Communist Party state-connected business partner. The said president’s son even got $1 million to represent as a lawyer one of the Chinese partners, who was then being investigated by the FBI for being a clandestine agent of China and who was later convicted by the Justice Department on foreign-corruption charges. After the disclosure in that prosecution that the United States government was conducting foreign-counterintelligence surveillance, the Chinese regime took this president’s son’s Chinese partner into custody, and he hasn’t been seen since.

That all seems pretty fraught.

Especially when one considers that, to apply for even the lowest-ranking national-security position in the United States government, an applicant must complete an extensively detailed form requiring disclosure of every foreign contact, trip, relationship, financial tie, and business transaction. And not only such foreign ties of the applicant but of all the applicant’s close family members — since our government assumes that a foreign regime’s hooks into family members are apt to lead to the compromise of U.S. national-security officials, who can be subjected to black mail and other pressure. And that is particularly true when the foreign regime in question is corrupt, authoritarian, and hostile to the United States — you know, like a Communist Party state.

Fraught indeed.