www.newyorker.com Open in urlscan Pro
151.101.0.239  Public Scan

Form analysis
1 forms found in the DOM

Name: newsletter — POST

<form class="form-with-validation NewsletterSubscribeFormValidation-dsEeXm hFsbmt" id="newsletter" name="newsletter" novalidate="" method="POST"><span class="TextFieldWrapper-fATMju UZDoI text-field" data-testid="TextFieldWrapper__email"><label
      class="BaseWrap-sc-UrHlS BaseText-fFrHpW TextFieldLabel-gQcDkL boMZdO ktEvBx gerMWb text-field__label text-field__label--single-line" for="newsletter-text-field-email" data-testid="TextFieldLabel__email">
      <div class="TextFieldLabelText-iZAlqq gRBMXJ">E-mail address</div>
      <div class="TextFieldInputContainer-fvxQdo fGWXMP"><input type="email" aria-describedby="privacy-text" aria-invalid="false" id="newsletter-text-field-email" required="" name="email" placeholder="Your e-mail address"
          class="BaseInput-jMfMHZ TextFieldControlInput-dlIoEs seydY fnjrix text-field__control text-field__control--input" data-testid="TextFieldInput__email" value=""></div>
    </label><button class="BaseButton-azpcp ButtonWrapper-dPwOur BbVnU dHizd button button--utility TextFieldButton-hEVqzz TLBVD" data-event-click="{&quot;element&quot;:&quot;Button&quot;}" data-testid="Button" type="submit"><span
        class="ButtonLabel-eAHUfq bCFzBu button__label">Sign up</span></button></span>
  <div id="privacy-text" tabindex="-1" class="NewsletterSubscribeFormDisclaimer-dhZnPK fSrkBw"><span>
      <p>By signing up, you agree to our <a href="https://www.condenast.com/user-agreement">User Agreement</a> and <a href="https://www.condenast.com/privacy-policy">Privacy Policy &amp; Cookie Statement</a>.</p>
    </span></div>
</form>

Text Content

Skip to main content

Get 12 weeks for $29.99 $6

 * Newsletter

Story Saved

To revisit this article, select My Account, then View saved stories

Close Alert
Close
Sign In
Subscribe
Cyber Week Sale
Get 12 weeks for $29.99 $6
Subscribe
Cancel anytime.

Search
Search
 * News
 * Books & Culture
 * Fiction & Poetry
 * Humor & Cartoons
 * Magazine
 * Puzzles & Games
 * Video
 * Podcasts
 * Archive
 * Goings On
 * Shop

Open Navigation Menu
Menu
Story Saved

To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories

Close Alert
Close


Cyber Week Sale Cyber Week Sale

Subscribe to The New Yorker for $29.99 $6. Cancel anytime.

Subscribe to The New Yorker for $29.99 $6. Cancel anytime.

Subscribe Subscribe Subscribe Already a subscriber? Sign in
Cyber Week Sale - 12 weeks for $29.99 $6. Cancel anytime. Become a New Yorker
subscriber.
12 weeks for $29.99 $6. Subscribe now Subscribe now Subscribe now



Our Columnists


DONALD TRUMP’S DEBT TO CHINA

By John Cassidy

April 24, 2020
 * Facebook
 * Twitter
 * Email
 * Print
 * Save Story
   Save this story for later.

The President’s reëlection campaign has released an ad attacking Hunter Biden’s
connection to a Chinese bank, but Trump has benefitted from Chinese investment,
too.Photograph by Thomas Peter / Getty

 * Facebook
 * Twitter
 * Email
 * Print
 * Save Story
   Save this story for later.



Earlier this week, the right-leaning commentator Walter Russell Mead published a
column in the Wall Street Journal arguing that Donald Trump’s best chance of
being reëlected in November is to run against China. “With the economy in
shambles and the pandemic ravaging the country, making the election a referendum
on China is perhaps Mr. Trump’s only chance to extend his White House tenure
past January 2021,” Mead wrote. This strategy would enable Trump to exploit a
coronavirus-related distrust of China, Mead added, and it would create problems
for Democrats which would include, but also go beyond, Hunter Biden’s business
ties to the Middle Kingdom. Plenty “of other senior Democrats have made money
(in China), supported trade policies that gave away too much without holding
Beijing accountable, or praised China’s government in ways that would make
painful viewing in a campaign ad today,” Mead said.

The column sounded cynical, but it didn’t come out of nowhere. Trump’s campaign
has already released an ad highlighting Hunter Biden’s connection to a Chinese
bank, and Trump said last weekend that if Joe Biden was elected foreign
countries such as China and Mexico would “own” him. On Thursday, Secretary of
State Mike Pompeo upped the ante, blaming China for the global COVID-19 death
toll. In an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, he said, “China caused an
enormous amount of pain, loss of life, and now a huge challenge for the global
economy and the American economy, as well, by not sharing the information they
had” about the virus. Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas and a
longtime China hawk, called for a big military buildup in East Asia. “The
Chinese Communist Party will try to exploit the world’s weakness in the wake of
a virus it unleashed,” Cotton claimed on Thursday. “We cannot allow it to
succeed.”

With criticisms of Trump’s handling of the pandemic growing and new opinion
polls showing him trailing Biden in several key battleground states, we are sure
to see more of these diversions. But adopting a China campaign strategy would
also present a number of problems for Trump, beginning with the fact that Hunter
Biden’s investment partnership isn’t the only American business that received
funding from Chinese entities. In 2012, the Bank of China, a commercial bank
owned by the Chinese state, provided more than two hundred million dollars in
loans to a New York office building that Trump co-owns, Politico reported on
Friday. The loans will come due in 2022, “in the middle of what could be Trump’s
second term,” the timely article noted.

The building in question is 1290 Avenue of the Americas, which is located
between West Fifty-first and West Fifty-second Streets. The majority owner of
the building is Vornado Realty Trust, a big real-estate company that is run by
the veteran developer Steven Roth. In 2007, the Trump Organization acquired a
thirty-per-cent stake in the Sixth Avenue building and also in separate Vornado
development, in San Francisco. By all appearances, the Vornado stake has been
one of Trump’s most successful investments, and the Bank of China played a
significant role in its success. “The debt stems from a $950 million refinancing
deal in 2012, to which the Bank of China chipped in $211 million,” the Politico
article said. “Vornado’s federal financial disclosures show it and the other
owner of 1290 Avenue of the Americas—Trump—are still indebted from the 2012
deal.”

To be sure, there is no suggestion in the Politico story that the Chinese bank
supplied this large sum of money specifically to curry favor with Trump. He
hadn’t officially entered politics in 2012, and the Chinese institution also
participated in other American real-estate deals around the same time. According
to a report in the Wall Street Journal from 2013, the Bank of China was “already
one of the largest foreign lenders to commercial real estate in the U.S.,
helping finance prestige properties.” The Journal story said that the Chinese
bank extended the 2012 loan to Vornado intending to package it into mortgage
bonds, which it could then sell to other investors at a profit. In an update to
its story, Politico wrote that on Friday evening the Bank of China issued a
statement saying it did do a securitization and “has not had any ownership
interest in that loan since late November 2012.”

Video From The New Yorker

The Garbage Man: Turning Trash Into Family Treasures



But the fact remains that Trump, through his thirty-per-cent stake in the
building on Sixth Avenue, has benefitted personally from a big loan from China,
whoever owns it now. The Politico article linked to a filing from Vornado to the
Securities and Exchange Commission, which shows that the
nine-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar loan carries an annual yield of 3.34 per
cent and is due in November, 2022. “There are definitely legitimate questions
that are raised by Hunter Biden’s actions,” Robert Maguire, the research
director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told
Politico. “They are not even in the same ballpark as the conflict of interest
questions raised by President Trump’s continued relationship with his own
company.”



Whether Trump’s businesses received more loans from state-owned Chinese banks—or
other investors with ties to foreign governments—is unknown because Trump
refuses to release his complete tax returns and other financial records. The
“financial disclosure law did not require him to disclose any business loans he
had not personally guaranteed,” Walter Shaub, a former head of the Office of
Government Ethics, which establishes standards for the executive branch, wrote
on Twitter on Friday. “So, who knows who else he owes money? I’ll tell you who:
The lenders who have him in their grip.”

We do know that Trump-family companies have done business with Chinese entities
on other occasions, too. In 2017, a Trump-branded golf resort in Dubai hired two
Chinese firms to do construction, McClatchy reported. And, since Trump has been
in the White House, the Chinese government has issued numerous trademarks to
Ivanka Trump’s businesses.

Relative to the size of the two-hundred-and-eleven-million-dollar loan in 2012,
these dealings were minor, but they confirm the essential truth that Trump,
despite his rhetoric, is a participant and a beneficiary of the global economic
system that he blames for the gutting of the American middle class. The Chinese
financial investments that end up funding Trump’s office buildings and similar
high-end developments are the mirror image of the trade deficit that has cost
the United States, and Trump-supporting regions in particular, millions of jobs.
The United States sends money across the Pacific to pay for goods manufactured
in China, then China uses a lot of that money to make dollar-denominated
investments in real estate and other sectors, and purchase U.S. Treasury bonds.

Trump won’t dwell on any of this during the campaign, of course. But, the next
time he brings up Hunter Biden or starts railing against the Chinese government,
somebody should ask him about the 2012 loan from the Bank of China.

This column has been updated to reflect amendments made to the original Politico
report.




John Cassidy has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1995. He also
writes a column about politics, economics, and more for newyorker.com.

More:Donald TrumpChina2020 ElectionCorruptionHunter Biden


THE DAILY

The best of The New Yorker, every day, in your in-box, plus occasional alerts
when we publish major stories.
E-mail address

Sign up

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie
Statement.



View all stories
Our Columnists
The Case for Joe Biden to Pick Elizabeth Warren as His Running Mate
As with any selection, Warren would involve risks and trade-offs. But she would
bring a number of big advantages to the ticket.

By John Cassidy

Daily Comment
Instead of Challenging Joe Biden, Maybe the Green Party Could Help Change Our
Democracy
Ranked-choice voting is not some impossible dream of a reform but, rather, an
achievable initiative that’s gaining momentum.

By Bill McKibben

Video
How the Coronavirus Is Widening Economic Inequality
The Reverend Dr. William Barber, the pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church,
speaks with David Remnick about the societal divisions that the coronavirus
pandemic has exacerbated.



Cyber Week Sale
Get 12 weeks for $29.99 $6 Subscribe Cancel anytime.
Get 12 weeks for $29.99 $6 Subscribe Cancel anytime.

Sections

 * News
 * Books & Culture
 * Fiction & Poetry
 * Humor & Cartoons
 * Magazine
 * Crossword
 * Video
 * Podcasts
 * Archive
 * Goings On

More

 * Customer Care
 * Shop The New Yorker
 * Buy Covers and Cartoons
 * Condé Nast Store
 * Digital Access
 * Newsletters
 * Jigsaw Puzzle
 * RSS

 * About
 * Careers
 * Contact
 * F.A.Q.
 * Media Kit
 * Press
 * Accessibility Help
 * Condé Nast Spotlight

© 2022 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance
of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your
California Privacy Rights. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from
products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate
Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced,
distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior
written permission of Condé Nast. Ad Choices


 * Facebook
 * Twitter
 * Snapchat
 * YouTube
 * Instagram

Manage Preferences





We and our partners store and/or access information on a device, such as unique
IDs in cookies to process personal data. You may accept or manage your choices
by clicking below or at any time in the privacy policy page. These choices will
be signaled to our partners and will not affect browsing data.More Information


WE AND OUR PARTNERS PROCESS DATA TO PROVIDE:

Use precise geolocation data. Actively scan device characteristics for
identification. Store and/or access information on a device. Personalised ads
and content, ad and content measurement, audience insights and product
development. List of Partners (vendors)

I Accept
Show Purposes