Readers, do you know how much web traffic and Google searches I’m giving up by not writing about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce? Congratulations to Swift and Kelce. May they have many happy years together. Also, Sauce Gardner did not commit pass interference.
On the menu today: This week, President Trump announced his intention to accept 600,000 Chinese students to American colleges and universities, more than doubling the number of Chinese students currently attending these schools. I don’t know how you feel about Trump’s second term, but Xi Jinping is probably loving it so far. Elsewhere, Cracker Barrel announces a full retreat and brings back the old man in the logo, while the Pentagon is discussing taking an ownership stake in major defense contractors.
When Exactly Is Trump Planning on Getting Tough on Beijing?
President Trump, during his meeting with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung, Monday:
President Xi would like me to come to China. It’s a very important relationship. As you know, we’re taking a lot of money in from China because of the tariffs and different things, and it’s a very important relationship. We’re going to get along good with China. I hear so many stories about we’re not going to allow their students or no, we’re going to allow their students to come in. We’re going to allow it. It’s very important, 600,000 students. It’s very important. But we’re going to get along with China, but it’s a different relationship that we have now with China.
If 600,000 Chinese students in American universities sounds like a lot to you, it’s because it is. That would represent more than doubling the number of Chinese students currently in the United States. As I wrote earlier this year, “The pattern of Chinese foreign students reflects that of foreign students overall — 50,000 to 100,000 each year throughout the 1990s and 2000s, tripling during the Obama years, and remaining close to 400,000 per year from 2017 to 2020. Since the pandemic, it’s dropped to a bit below 300,000 per year.”
I wrote that after Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced, “Under President Trump’s leadership, the U.S. State Department will work with the Department of Homeland Security to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields. We will also revise visa criteria to enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications from the People’s Republic of China and Hong Kong.”
A day later, at a cabinet meeting, Trump argued that the U.S. higher education system would collapse without maintaining the current high levels of foreign students:
Q: Mr. President, in May, Secretary Rubio said that they were aggressively removing visas of Chinese students. Yesterday, you said you wanted to allow 600,000 Chinese students to study in the United States. Could you and the secretary clarify what is the policy on Chinese students in the United States of America?
Trump: Well, we think we’re — you know, look, we’re getting along very well with China and I’m getting along very well with President Xi. I think it’s very insulting to say students can’t come here, because they’ll go out and they’ll start building schools and they’ll be able to survive it, but I like that their students come here. I like that other countries’ students come here. And you know what would happen if they didn’t, our college system would go to hell very quickly. You’d have — and it wouldn’t be the top colleges, it would be colleges that struggle on the bottom, and you take out 300,000 or 600,000 students out of the system.
I like having — and I told this to President Xi, that we’re honored to have the students here. Now, with that, we check and we’re careful and we see who’s there and Marco wants — we spoke. We’re in the same position, but we have a tremendous college system, the best in the world, nobody even close. That’s why China sends them here.
The total number of international students at U.S. colleges and universities reached an all-time high of more than 1.1 million (1,126,690) in the 2023–2024 school year.
I would argue that the average American has no idea how high the percentages of foreign students are at many U.S. colleges and universities. Columbia University and Northeastern University have student bodies that are 40 percent foreign students, Carnegie Mellon has one that is 44 percent foreign students, and Illinois Tech has a student body that is 51 percent foreign students. (All percentages are from this New York Times chart, which got the data from the National Center for Education Statistics.)
Back in May, the usual suspects denounced the new policy revoking student visas for those with ties to the Chinese Communist Party as an “authoritarian attack” and “a blatant act of anti-Asian scapegoating that not only harms Chinese students, but also fuels hate and racial profiling against Asian people more broadly.”
I would simply point to U.S. immigration law. If a voluntary member of a Communist Party over age 16 cannot legally become an immigrant, it is unclear why we would want a lot of voluntary members of a Communist Party over age 16 studying and working on American college campuses:
Subsequently, Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) of 1952 which, for the first time, authorized the exclusion of all aliens, immigrants or nonimmigrants, on the basis of membership in or affiliation with the Communist or any other totalitarian party.[14] As with previous acts, the INA of 1952 also declared that aliens were excludable based on a wide variety of other activities linked to the Communist Party or other totalitarian parties even if the aliens were not members or affiliates.
The INA of 1952 included exceptions and waivers similar to those available today. There were two classes of exceptions available to immigrants and nonimmigrants alike. The first, which was based solely on the alien’s personal history (and tracked the Internal Security Act amendments of 1951), excepted aliens if their membership or affiliation “is or was involuntary, or is or was solely when under sixteen years of age, by operation of law, or for purposes of obtaining employment, food rations, or other essentials of living and where necessary for such purposes.”
Back in May, I argued that the new policy on Chinese student visas represented a long-overdue reassessment of the risks and rewards of having a lot of students from the People’s Republic of China on American college campuses, particularly universities doing sensitive or consequential research for the U.S. government.
In 2017, the Chinese government passed the National Intelligence Law, which declares all Chinese citizens are required to “support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence efforts,” regardless of their location. So if the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) comes along and demands that Chinese students start reporting on what’s being researched in the labs at the university they’re attending, any Chinese student who doesn’t cooperate can be arrested. Or, in quite a few cases, the target’s family can be threatened. The Chinese MSS relies heavily on “nontraditional collectors” — foreign students, emigrants, and Chinese Americans with family back in China — who can be threatened, strong-armed, coerced, or bribed into becoming spies.
Back in 2018, FBI Director Christopher Wray told the Senate Intelligence Committee, “The use of nontraditional collectors, especially in the academic setting, whether it’s professors, scientists, students, we see in almost every field office that the FBI has around the country. It’s not just in major cities. It’s in small ones as well. It’s across basically every discipline. And I think the level of naïveté on the part of the academic sector about this creates its own issues. They’re exploiting the very open research and development environment that we have, which we all revere, but they’re taking advantage of it.”
I would note that the policy Rubio announced in May had no restriction on students from Taiwan. We don’t really worry all that much about espionage from free societies and independent countries.*
But apparently because Trump is getting along with Xi Jinping lately, we are going to more than double the number of Chinese students on college campuses. University presidents should be dancing a jig this morning and singing Trump’s praises; he’s here to save them from the enrollment cliff that arrives over the next two years.
I keep getting told that Trump is going to get tough on China and that he was the only guy who could really stand up to Xi. But Trump is openly defying the law on TikTok, keeping a major Chinese influence and propaganda tool in place. Trump is now allowing American companies to sell advanced chips to Chinese companies, reversing a Biden-era ban. He clearly has no interest in bringing up the lab leak in any significant way. Additionally, he barred the travel plans of the Taiwanese president.
If Trump is the only guy who can get tough on China, when does he intend to begin?
*Yes, I realize our government still has the asinine “One China policy,” but I try to refer to Taiwan as an independent country as often as possible because it annoys all the right people.
A Barrel of Laughs
I know that some readers of this newsletter responded to the Cracker Barrel rebranding brouhaha with “who cares?” But just because you don’t care about a particular issue doesn’t mean other people don’t care about it, and the fact that this has been the subject of all kinds of commentary, tirades, and memes over the past week suggests that a decent chunk of the public cared. Some contended (not all that accurately, in my opinion) that it represented the country going “woke,” while others saw what I saw: a company that once had a very distinctive brand based on nostalgia reinventing itself as bland and generic, a sad triumph of modern corporate minimalism. (As one artist demonstrated, just drawing lines on the half-melted Velveeta that was supposed to be a barrel made the new logo better and more memorable.)
Also, keep in mind, the leadership of Cracker Barrel wanted the public to notice and respond; that’s why CEO Julie Masino announced the new logo on Good Morning America.
Yesterday, Cracker Barrel effectively surrendered to the critics of the new logo, and announced that “our new logo is going away and our ‘Old Timer’ will remain.”
Over at Fox News, Asra Nomani has the inside scoop on the internal deliberations over the company’s rebranding, and it indicates this is what many outsiders thought they saw: A new CEO with experience at other restaurants wanted to “evolve the brand,” ignoring objections and never grappling with whether the new look and vibe fit the existing customers or would attract new ones.
One of the company’s biggest investors, Sardar Biglari, warned that the redesign would be “obvious folly” for a restaurant chain whose identity is built on nostalgia. Biglari pointed out in a memo, “The day Cracker Barrel opened,” in 1969, “it was already old — its theme derived from the 1920s. I am concerned that not only will the remodel not work but it could actually damage the brand further.”
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it yesterday, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said top officials at the Pentagon are “thinking about” whether the U.S. should acquire equity stakes in leading defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin. The Trump administration is becoming the biggest and most powerful force expanding the role of government in private businesses in a generation. It makes the prospect of New York City’s government running a couple of grocery stores look like small potatoes.
But remember, everyone! We’ve got to stop the Communists!