As I write this, President Trump is in China being toasted by the leader of the largest nation on earth, and returning toasts in kind -- Diet Coke, probably.
We've already heard that the Chinese have agreed to buy new quantities of soybeans from America, and that deals are in place for some 200 new jets from Boeing (and the attendant hiring boom that will take place at that airplane giant). These are gargantuan successes in international trade diplomacy.
We've also heard that Presidents Trump and Xi have discussed the possibility of China buying oil and natural gas from the USA to replace the fuels on the Chinese tankers that are languishing in the Persian Gulf currently under blockade.
That last deal makes an insane amount of sense. The USA has huge resources of fossil fuels, with great resources in Alaska. You don't have to have much of a sense of geography to know that it's a straighter shot for oil tankers to get from Alaska to Beijing than it is from the Persian Gulf.
But more importantly, if you're China, buying your oil from the USA makes a lot more sense than buying it from Iran. Look at the two countries. In one, you have an Islamist radical faction shunned by their Arab neighbors, willing to kill 40,000+ of its own citizens merely for speaking out in public. You want to buy oil from them? In the other, you have an acutely stable republic founded on ethical and moral principles, with multiple energy companies willing to compete for your business. Easy choice.
So good things are happening this week. Good things that should be celebrated by the leaders of the opposition party, the Democrats, as loudly as by the Republicans.
But that is not going to happen.
Consider this posture: In almost any election in this country, if you listen to debates, you will notice a distinct difference if you choose to pay attention. The 21st Century Democrat candidate is interested only in winning the election, as the be-all and end-all. "Success" is winning the job. The Republican candidate will be talking about governing, as in what the candidate will do once in the job.
Get the difference? The Republican is running to fix the problems that are at the forefront of the competition. Potholes? I'll try to fix potholes on Day One. War in East Pooflia? I'll try to get that war settled as soon as possible, and here is how.
The Democrat has no solutions, because liberal solutions do not work and never have. Liberal solutions consist of:
(1) Throw money at it.
(2) Hire lots of government employees.
Number (1) is what they say in the campaigns, because it sounds good. Number (2) is what they end up doing, because that's where that thrown money goes, except when it is going to NGOs, phony hospices and Learing Centers, to get cycled back as donations to Democrat campaigns.
Democrats do not worry about actually governing, because that is not their goal -- look back up at the paragraph about the Trump/Xi toasts and just picture AOC meeting with Xi instead. Argh. Their goal is not about governing.
It is about power.
Power in the USA devolves from winning elections. That is why everything that the Democrats support is on the side of how to get more votes for Democrats, whether "legally" by gerrymandering all of New England, Maryland, Illinois and California, or illegally by hijacking the mail-in ballot process in states that allow abuse by bundling votes, creating see-through envelopes, or just hauling in pre-filled ballots from neighboring states.
Why ever are the Democrats on the side of open borders and letting 20 million illegal storm across the border? Duh ... votes. Why ever would the Democrats be in favor of non-citizens and felons voting? Duh ... more votes (the assumption is that illegal aliens and felons would vote for Democrats, presumably seeing kindred spirits).
When there's one of those 90-10 issues that you can't for the life of you figure out why Democrats would take the "10%" side, you know, like men playing women's sports, just use the same logic, starting with how that side would get them more votes (in that one, I can only imagine that they assume they'll get the votes of the trans folks, and that everyone else will just vote the way they normally would because the other issues are more important to them).
The Democrats have to try to focus on winning elections because they have no capacity to govern. Barack Obama's singular achievement was not governing; he was clearly terrible at that, from ramming a horrible health-insurance bill through, to signing awful deals with Iran and the Paris climate agreement that Trump couldn't extricate the USA from fast enough in his first term. No, Obama's distinction was only becoming president. Are you starting to get my point?
Joe Biden wasn't even actually president, I'm pretty sure; virtually everyone was asking for four years who was pulling the strings in the White House, since it sure wasn't Joe. And it wasn't Kamala Harris either; Joe's handlers publicly made her czarina of this or that, and she accomplished absolutely nothing. By contrast, the current vice president was just given the role of anti-fraud czar, and already since JD Vance took over, well over $300 million has been held back from states identified in a whole-of-government approach as having been paying bogus firms and NGOs, many of which then kicked back a percentage to Democrat candidates. Prosecutions are spinning up and some criminals are going to spend some serious prison time. That is governing.
The same understanding would apply in, say, California. Thousands of homes were burned last year, and the state has done ... nothing (governor is a Democrat). The city of Los Angeles has done ... nothing (mayor is a Democrat). The reservoirs supplying the firefighters at the time of the fire were empty, but the Democrat mayor was in Africa, where you'd expect the LA mayor to be. Oh, you wouldn't? You're probably right.
You'd think that at the very least, the elected leaders would ensure that the permitting process would be fast-tracked so the victims' homes could be rebuilt. Yet as of January, a year after the fire, fewer than twelve had actually been permitted and rebuilt. The Democrats running California simply cannot run the simplest of processes, because it is not in their skill set to do so -- they're trained only to win elections, not to govern once in office.
This fall, American voters will go back to the polls to elect all House members and a third of the Senate. The legal voters will realize that for all the vote-buying and promises of the Democrats, they accomplish nothing, and will likely reverse the usual trend of presidents losing House seats in mid-term elections.
We can only hope that only legal voters vote. But you know those wacky Democrats ... it will only be "How do we win the election?" right up until they've won enough of them that there's no need to hold them anymore.
Like they do in China.
Copyright 2026 by Robert Sutton. Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com and, after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.