 Cameron Hood
Newsletter Editor
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Welcome to Grid Today, bringing you context and clarity on the most important stories of the day.
In today’s edition, we’re looking at international reactions to Donald Trump’s indictment, election results in Wisconsin and Chicago, China’s “no limits” relationship with Russia, a new EPA plan and much more.
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Global reactions to Trump’s indictment
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From questions about the state of democracy in the “Divided Nations of America” to humorous memes and AI-generated images of Donald Trump in orange prison overalls, the arraignment of the former president was watched closely not just inside the country but around the world, with America’s friends and foes alike asking a version of the question: What does this tell us about the world’s dominant superpower?
🇨🇳 For Chinese state media, the answer was crystal clear: It was all a confirmation of a “social divide, systemic alienation, and political and cultural decay,” as one Xinhua News Agency report put it. The grim diagnosis was in keeping with the general tone of Chinese state outlets, which often play up problems inside the United States, and echoed an earlier report by the state-backed Global Times newspaper, headlined: “US risks sinking into political disorder as Trump indicted, political system in disarray.”
The accompanying piece even speculated that the arraignment was — as the former president has repeatedly claimed — politically motivated, a clear and not exactly subtle way of saying that the legal system was being manipulated by Trump’s opponents. According to the Global Times, “Experts also warned of a normalization of indicting former presidents in the US as politics of retaliation has become routine, with political and legal tools being further weaponized to attack political opponents.”
Elsewhere, the tone on China’s tightly controlled social media channels was one of mockery peppered with misinformation — with one hashtag on Weibo about “Trump’s 136 year prison term” getting some 400 million views by Wednesday afternoon, according to the Washington Post.
Earlier, when the indictment was announced, several Chinese social media users gleefully shared memes hailing Trump as “Comrade Nation Builder,” someone who had strengthened China by embarrassing the U.S.
“Comrade Nation Builder, in the police station, in the courts, you must surely endure, we are waiting for you to retire so you can return and watch the sunset with us,” said one popular post on Friday, according to Business Insider. The over-the-top text was studded with over-the-top AI-generated images of Trump retiring in China.
🇷🇺 There was mockery and misinformation in Russia, too: Ahead of the former U.S. leader’s appearance in New York, Russian state TV broadcast a fake image of Trump in orange overalls as guests discussed the indictment.
During one Russian TV broadcast, the host wondered whether Trump would be re-elected and thus find himself in the Oval Office wearing — you guessed it — orange overalls and handcuffs, according to the Daily Beast. He also outlined an alternative — and just as wild — scenario, asking whether instead Trump might seek asylum in Russia. “Should we afford the opportunity for Donald Trump to escape the unfair political persecution in Russia?” the host asked, jokingly.
🇩🇪 It wasn’t just America’s foes who were watching. Allies, too, looked on with interest as the spectacle unfolded in New York. The tone was different; instead of mockery, Germany’s Der Spiegel, for example, ran a commentary underlining the strength of the American judicial system, saying that “in a constitutional democracy, no one can stand about the law.”
🇫🇷 The point was also highlighted by France’s Le Monde. France is no stranger to the indictments of former leaders; ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy was sentenced to three years in prison — two of them suspended — in 2021 for corruption and influence peddling. “Trump has only himself to blame,” Le Monde said in an editorial, even as it acknowledged that the developments in New York this week constituted “a new test for an American democracy under strain.”
🇮🇳 The reaction in India, another U.S. ally, was mostly straightforward, focused on the spectacle — although some did see the news as an occasion for a moment of schadenfreude. One commentator writing for the Indian online news portal FirstPost, and highlighting claims by Trump supporters that the charges in New York were politically motivated, said New Delhi should “express its concerns” about the arraignment, much in the way Washington has in the past expressed its concerns about the need to preserve democratic principles abroad — including in India. “India’s ministry of external affairs should take note of the backsliding of democratic norms in the US and the worrying erosion of judicial independence,” he wrote.
—Deputy Global Editor Nikhil Kumar
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High-profile elections in Wisconsin and Chicago, recapped
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Abortion activists’ focus on an open Wisconsin Supreme Court seat paid off Tuesday night after Democratic-backed Judge Janet Protasiewicz beat Republican-favored candidate Daniel Kelly — underscoring abortion as an important issue for voters in the state.
“I saw that Wisconsinites were ready for common sense and fairness on their Supreme Court,” Protasiewicz said in her victory speech Tuesday night.
As I wrote in Monday’s newsletter, groups like Emily’s List and Women’s March had zeroed in on the race’s potential impact on future abortion access in Wisconsin. The state’s highest court is likely to play a pivotal role in expected legal challenges to a pre-Civil War law banning abortion — something Protasiewicz didn’t shy away from during her campaign. In multiple campaign ads leading up to the election, Protasiewicz stated that she believed in a woman’s right to an abortion.
The election broke records in spending and voter participation, with the Associated Press reporting on Wednesday that “turnout had already surpassed 36% of the voting-age population, with more than 10% of votes yet to be counted.” And according to a WisPolitics.com analysis published last month, the campaigns spent more than $45 million, “almost tripling the previous national record.”
And just across the Wisconsin border, Chicagoans voted for a new mayor in another high-profile election Tuesday.
Candidate Brandon Johnson, a former Cook County commissioner who had received multiple endorsements from national political figures like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), defeated fellow Democrat Paul Vallas, a former Chicago Public Schools CEO.
With 1,286 of 1,291 precincts counted, Johnson received more than 51 percent of the vote compared to Vallas, who had received more than 48 percent.
While both campaigns largely focused on crime in the nation’s third-largest city, the two candidates presented very different approaches. Johnson specifically said he wanted to tackle the “root causes” of crime and proposed sending mental health professionals to handle certain situations so police would be able to focus on the most violent crimes.
— Politics Reporter Sophie Tatum
(Photo by Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)
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What China means by “no limits”
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Words matter in diplomacy and geopolitics. And when the words don’t match a nation’s behavior, the world notices. Remember Barack Obama’s “red line“ for Syria’s use of chemical weapons? George W. Bush’s infamous “Mission Accomplished“ banner during the Iraq War? Since Russia attacked Ukraine more than a year ago, two words have come to define Russia’s partnership with China: “no limits.” As in, the “no limits” friendship that was announced with fanfare on the sidelines of the Beijing Winter Olympic Games, where Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping met less than three weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Since then, nearly every analysis of global support for Putin and Russia has referenced China and used those words: “No limits.”
💠 Now a top Chinese diplomat has said, effectively, never mind. In an interview with the New York Times, China’s ambassador to the European Union, Fu Cong, said that “no limits” was a rhetorical term and nothing more. People “deliberately misinterpret this because there’s the so-called no limit friendship or relationship,” Fu said. “‘No limit’ is nothing but rhetoric.”
It’s a startling turnabout. The 2022 China-Russia declaration was a carefully crafted 5,400-word document, and it was loaded with specific avenues for cooperation — opposing NATO expansion, supporting China’s stance on Taiwan, and increasing sales of Russian oil and gas to China (something that has proved particularly valuable to Moscow since its invasion and the Western sanctions that followed.)
After Putin sent troops into Ukraine, “no limits” took on other meanings: China wouldn’t condemn the war, the government in Beijing was at pains to not even call it a “war,” and senior Chinese officials said often that blame for the invasion lay with NATO and the West. “No limits” also meant that China would continue to buy and sell with Moscow, a wartime commerce that has helped stock the Kremlin’s coffers.
The specific phrase in that 2022 document went like this: "Friendship between the two states has no limits, there are no 'forbidden' areas of cooperation."
But in his remarks this week, Fu seemed keen to stress the limits. He noted that China has provided no military aid to Russia and has yet to recognize Putin’s annexation of Ukrainian territories.
💠 What’s going on here? Part of the answer involves timing and diplomacy with Europe.
Fu gave the interview as Presidents Emmanuel Macron of France and Ursula von der Leyen of the European Commission were en route to Beijing. European nations have profound economic ties with China, and China is no doubt trying to burnish those relationships and — if possible — drive a wedge between Europe and the United States. China has also offered to mediate in the war, a role Macron has also shown interest in pursuing. In this atmosphere, it wouldn’t be a bad moment for Beijing to project some distance from Putin and Moscow, as a positive signal to the Europeans. It would also stand to reason that China’s EU ambassador be called upon to deliver that message.
Another theory was floated last week and referenced in this newsletter by my colleague Global Security Reporter Joshua Keating. Reporting on Putin’s plans to station Russian nuclear weapons in neighboring Belarus, Keating raised the question: “Is it possible the message Putin was sending was intended less for his adversaries to the West and more for his allies to the East?”
In this line of thinking, Putin may have been nonplussed by the thin reed of support he was actually receiving from Beijing. As Keating noted, while last month’s Putin-Xi summit in Moscow was a political win for the Kremlin, “it came with few specific deliverables. Xi did not sign off, as Putin was clearly hoping he would, on a proposed pipeline project to reroute Russia’s gas exports from Europe to Asia.” And there were no announcements of any direct military support from Beijing.
Writing on Substack, former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul suggested that the announcement of nuclear deployments to Belarus may have been a message to Beijing, which has warned repeatedly against making nuclear threats. “Maybe Putin was so disappointed with the lack of gifts that Xi brought to Moscow,” McFaul wrote, “that he wanted to get back at Xi with the only power card he holds in his hand: nuclear weapons.”
💠 There had been earlier signs of fraying in the “no limits” friendship.
At a fall 2022 meeting, Xi referred to Putin as his “dear and old friend,” but Putin acknowledged that Xi had raised “questions and concerns” about Ukraine. Several analysts have told Grid that Chinese officials were surprised and dismayed by the length and brutality of the war. And again, Putin’s references to the nuclear option — veiled or not — have been received poorly in Beijing.
That said, for an ambassador to say that his country’s public declaration of a “no limits” geopolitical partnership was “nothing more than rhetoric” is unusual, to say the least. And rhetoric or no, the Moscow-Beijing relationship may be in the midst of a rethink.
As for that 5,400-word paper that came to be known as the “no-limits” document, there may be a need, in the upper echelons of the foreign ministry in Beijing, for a rewrite.
— Global Editor Tom Nagorski
(Photo by Xie Huanchi/Xinhua via Getty Images)
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Speaking of limits: A new EPA plan on hazardous emisisons
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The Environmental Protection Agency is proposing new, tighter limits on emissions of mercury, nickel, arsenic and other hazardous air pollutants from coal-fired power plants.
The agency released its plan Monday as part of a long-anticipated effort to undo a Trump-era rollback of a key human health protection. Environmental groups as well as prominent Democrats in Washington welcomed the move.
“EPA’s mercury and air toxics standards have been one of the most successful public health measures in the agency’s history, saving lives, decreasing heart disease, and preventing asthma attacks,” said John Walke, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s clean air project, in a statement. “But it’s long past time for an update.”
☀️ Cleaner skies: The new rule would reduce the emissions limit for filterable particulate matter by 67 percent for coal-fired power plants; that would cut down on the release of nickel, arsenic and other metals that can harm human health. It would also reduce the limit for mercury from certain coal plants by 70 percent. Mercury is known to cause numerous health problems for people of all ages, though particularly for children and pregnant individuals.
↩️ Reversing course: In 2020, the Trump administration changed a rule that made it easier to roll back mercury and other pollutant restrictions. Earlier this year, President Joe Biden’s EPA undid that, reestablishing the principle that regulating those emissions is “appropriate and necessary.” The EPA estimated the new proposal would offer net public health benefits of up to $3 billion for the 10 years between 2028 and 2037.
The costs of updating coal-fired power plants to comply with the new standard is likely just another nail in the dirty power source’s coffin, with many such plants already retiring each year and both renewable energy and natural gas proving far cheaper.
Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), the chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, praised the new proposal. “EPA’s proposed rule would build on the progress made to better protect communities,” he said in a statement. “This science-based rule will ensure that power plants use modern pollution control technology, which will help save lives and support a healthy economy.”
— Climate Reporter Dave Levitan
(Photo by Marek Piwnicki/Unsplash)
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👋 That’s all for today. See you tomorrow for more news. –Cameron
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