China is known for many things, including a very repressive prison system where people are known to be falsely accused of crimes and sometimes sentenced to death for them after a quick trial that serves more as a show than a pursuit of justice. This has been a problem for many years, and it has worsened as the CCP has struggled to maintain an ironclad lock on power. While on the campaign trail and when discussing reforms to the criminal justice system, President Trump praised the tyrannical communist nation and Chinese President Xi for executing drug dealers after what he called “quick but fair trials”.
President Donald Trump is campaigning on criminal justice reform efforts that reduce sentences for nonviolent offenders, while suggesting he’d like the American justice system to work more like ones in authoritarian countries where drug dealers are executed after “fair but quick” trials.
If those two things sound hard to square with each other, that’s because they are. But the contrast serves as an especially stark illustration of the incoherency at the core of Trumpism.
Just days after his Super Bowl ad and State of the Union speech highlighted his support for legislation that makes a modest effort to reduce prison sentences at the federal level, Trump on Monday said the best way to further reduce the quantity of fentanyl in the US is to follow China’s lead.
“States with a very powerful death penalty on drug dealers don’t have a drug problem,” Trump said during a White House event with governors. “I don’t know that our country is ready for that, but if you look throughout the world, the countries with a powerful death penalty — death penalty — with a fair but quick trial, they have very little if any drug problem. That includes China.” (source)