OPINION:
Did a small number of big donors sabotage the now-flailing presidential campaign of Ron DeSantis? That’s a possible subplot behind the recent clipping of the Florida governor’s budding China hawk wings. The incident more broadly reveals a coterie of American billionaires and lobbyists aiding and abetting Beijing’s dangerous rise.
It started this past May. To outflank former President Donald Trump, Mr. DeSantis spearheaded the passage of the Foreign Countries of Concern law in his state. That same month, “DeSanctimonious,” as Mr. Trump would call him, launched his presidential campaign.
Mr. DeSantis’ new law prevents Chinese agents from buying property near U.S. military bases in Florida. It also bans Chinese investment from funding projects there.
It’s no state secret that China loves to buy land near our military bases to surveil them. I saw plenty of unclassified intelligence about that in the White House.
Nor should the Chinese be gobbling up America’s commercial and residential property as spoils of their economic warfare. China’s mercantilist manufacturers steal America’s intellectual property, flood our markets with unfairly subsidized goods, run up our trade deficit, and then recycle back our dollars into buying up America — while driving up rents and home prices for American citizens.
While at first blush, the DeSantis law does indeed seem very tough on China, as always, the devil is in the details. Enter stage right the apex Wall Street predator, billionaire Ken Griffin — one of the first big donors to hop on the DeSantis train.
From inside the DeSantis perimeter, Mr. Griffin appears to have orchestrated the lobbying charge to water down key portions of Mr. DeSantis’ legislation. To Mr. DeSantis’ humiliation, his own chief of staff carried the watering can with a proposed weakening rule change.
Mr. Griffin had no shortage of help in seeking to make Florida’s land safe for Chinese spies and land grabbers. Front and center has been the Real Estate Roundtable — the lobbying hammer of big real estate investors including Citigroup, Starwood, Wells Fargo, and Blackstone and its chairman, Steve Schwarzman.
Mr. Schwarzman is the biggest Chinese Communist Party sympathizer I ever had the displeasure to spar with in the West Wing. While constantly back-channeling top Chinese officials, Mr. Schwarzman aggressively lobbied against the Trump tariffs. He would later brag about his outsized influence on the January 2020 trade deal that China would, of course, renege on.
The lust for more wealth of multibillionaires like Mr. Griffin and Mr. Schwarzman seemingly has no bounds. Mr. Griffin is already the second-richest man in Florida; the two rank third and fourth on the list of the richest people in the finance and investment industry, behind only Elon Musk and Michael Bloomberg.
Yet Mr. Griffin and Mr. Schwarzman, along with other Wall Street billionaires like Larry Fink and Ray Dalio, exhibit no empathy for the working-class Americans and domestic manufacturers under relentless mercantilist attacks from China. Instead, they equally relentlessly advance Chinese interests to further pad their bank accounts.
Here’s the simple lesson for presidential aspirants like Mr. DeSantis: You can’t out-Trump Trump on China if you allow the likes of Ken Griffin to bankroll your presidential ambitions.
Here’s the more complex question: Did Mr. Griffin initially throw his wallet behind Ron DeSantis just to get inside his perimeter, hook him on his big donations, and then force him to weaken his policies on China as he has? Or was the real chess move not just to castrate Mr. DeSantis, but to gut him?
Mr. Griffin surely knew his high-profile endorsement and lavish funding of Mr. DeSantis would immediately turn off any of Mr. Trump’s MAGA base that Mr. DeSantis might otherwise have been able to chip off. The Florida governor was dead in the water just days after his official launch because the Griffin brand is so toxic in flyover country.
Of course, the gutting of Mr. DeSantis still leaves Mr. Griffin, along with other China cheerleaders like Messrs. Schwarzman, Fink and Dalio, with a Donald Trump problem. But isn’t that where, for this flock of big donors, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley comes in?
As South Carolina governor, Mrs. Haley bear-hugged China as she littered her state with nonunion, low-wage, foreign auto assembly plants. She led the charge in 2015 to bring Chinese-owned Volvo to build the automaker’s first assembly plant in the U.S. — even lavishing over $200 million in taxpayer subsidies on China to land the plant.
Of course, Mr. Griffin’s billionaire club and the broader coalition of RINOs, the Koch network, and George W. Bush and Conway neocons opposing Mr. Trump know that my old boss is unstoppable as the Republican nominee. So they are quietly putting their money and power behind Mrs. Haley to ensure she makes a credible showing. Then they will try to force Mr. Trump to put her mean and hungry look on the ticket.
My guess is that Donald Trump will never put a VP Haley in the West Wing. One Mike Pence was enough, and Nikki Haley has been nothing but disloyal trouble since Mr. Trump bailed her out of a failing political career and appointed her U.N. ambassador. This is why American politics are so interesting.
The broader lesson for the American public is that we the people must rein in the power of China advocates like Messrs. Griffin, Schwarzman, Dalio and Fink. One very good place to start may be to investigate those who lobby on behalf of Chinese interests as possible unregistered foreign lobbyists under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Those found guilty could face up to five years in prison — which may be enough to get America’s billionaire class to stand down.
• Peter Navarro served in the Trump White House as manufacturing czar and chief China hawk. This column originally appeared at http://peternavarro.substack.com.
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