Posted on 05/21/2026 7:37:19 AM PDT by Red Badger
When Xi Jinping rolled out the red carpet for Gavin Newsom inside the Great Hall of the People in October 2023, the staging told you everything you needed to know about who the meeting was actually for. The general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party does not summon backbench governors for ceremonial handshakes. He receives heads of state. And the American official sitting across from him that day was not a head of state. He was the governor of one state in a federal union, traveling on what his own office called a “subnational” diplomatic mission to a hostile foreign power.
The visit was sold to the American public as climate cooperation. What it actually accomplished was a global audition for a 2028 presidential run, a parallel foreign policy track that the Constitution explicitly forbids, and a deepening of California’s regulatory marriage to a regime that runs slave-labor camps in Xinjiang and exports the fentanyl precursors killing tens of thousands of Americans every year. The mainstream press treated it as a charming diplomatic detour. It was nothing of the kind.
Newsom’s weeklong tour produced five memoranda of understanding signed with the National Development and Reform Commission and the provinces and municipalities of Guangdong, Jiangsu, Shanghai, and Beijing. He met with Vice Premier Han Zheng, Foreign Minister Wang Yi, and Xi himself. The Office of the Governor of California posted on social media that “divorce is not an option” between California and Beijing. That was not a throwaway line. It was a statement of policy.
The Red Carpet a Governor Should Not Get
Set the China trip against the backdrop of what Newsom was governing at home. California was bleeding population for the third consecutive year. Retail theft had become so normalized that chains were closing flagship stores in San Francisco.
The state was staring down a multibillion-dollar budget deficit, the homeless encampments were metastasizing, and the energy grid was rationing power during heat waves. The governor’s response was to spend a week in Beijing posing for photographs with the men running the Uyghur internment system.
The Christian Science Monitor noted that some analysts read the trip as “a bit of political theater” for a politician with presidential aspirations. That was the polite framing. The honest framing is that Xi Jinping does not host political theater. He hosts ambassadors of regimes he wants to influence, and Newsom was auditioning for the part.
The Constitution is unambiguous on this point. Article I, Section 10 states that “No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation” and that no state shall, without the consent of Congress, “enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power.” The Founders understood that fifty governors freelancing their own foreign policy with hostile regimes was the road to dissolution.
The Newsom administration and its defenders will protest that an MOU is non-binding. That is technically true, and the California Globe pointed out the obvious reason it has to be true. The governor of one state lacks the constitutional authority to make treaties with foreign nations.
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I thought that trip was to show his great basketball skills against 10 year olds.
Newsom had just given China a billion dollars supposedly for face masks that didn’t help stop the spread of the China virus. Don’t be fooled, it was a bribe for China to do their thing in backing a Newsom presidential run.
Democrats making China’s job much easier by the day.
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