The former U.S. ambassador to China during the Obama administration has compared President Trump to Adolf Hitler and Joseph McCarthy on Chinese state-run television.
Max Baucus, who served as Montana senator from 1978 to 2014 until he was appointed ambassador to Beijing, compared Trump’s rhetoric on China to that of Hitler and McCarthy during a May 6 interview on CNN. Since then, Baucus has appeared on Chinese state television and repeated his claims.
“Joe McCarthy [and] Adolf Hitler…rallied people up, making people believe things that were really not true,” Baucus told China Global Television Network on May 12., as reported by the Washington Free Beacon. “The White House and some in Congress are making statements against China that are so over the top and so hypercritical, they are based not on the fact, or if they are based on fact, sheer demagoguery, and that’s what McCarthy did in the 1950s.”
On May 14, Baucus told China’s state-run Global Times, “We Americans are so used to being number one. We’re so used to being the leader in the world. Now that might change.”
While in Congress, Baucus rose to become chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. According to his biography on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce website, Baucus is also the “architect” of the Affordable Health Care Act. The bio states that Baucus is on the “Board of Advisors” to Alibaba, China’s largest e-commerce group, and that he is an “External Advisor” to the Central Intelligence Agency.
Following the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, President Trump and Republican lawmakers have significantly increased criticism of China. U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that the Chinese government concealed the extent of the initial outbreak, which began in the city of Wuhan, in part in order to hoard supplies of medical equipment.
A poll for Politico released on Wednesday indicates that 31 percent of U.S. voters see China as an “enemy,” while another 30 percent view China not as an enemy but still “unfriendly.”