??? -- What has that to do with the availability of hotel rooms?
Plenty of rooms available back in March when WH tried to book. This was done intentionally. Just as forcing Obama to take the rear staircase of AF 1 when he arrived for China G20 Summit was intentional. No difference. Although Trump did tweet that the Germans should cough up their dues to NATO on March 19. Coincidence in the timing? How childish are these people? President Trump should return to AF 1 and tell the Pilot to turn around and go back to the US right now. Skip the meeting and tell the world this disrespect won't be tolerated.
Plenty of rooms available back in March when WH tried to book. This was done intentionally.
Dear, God! Could there be a more oblique way to convey that the
willful denial of of hotel space is the key theme of a "breaking news" story entitled "No hotel room for President Trump in Germany for G20?"
Whatever...Is the deliberacy of there being no quarter for Trump the central point you wanted readers to notice/discuss? If so, so what? As I showed, Trump arrived in Hamburg with his own hotel room.
Let's, for a moment, ponder the potential verity of your attestation that hoteliers in Hamburg purposefully denied Trump quarter, perhaps in an effort to send a message by doing so. Neither of your linked articles intimates that anyone intentionally refused Trump lodging. Why, then, should we think your claim to that effect is anything other than boorishly, perhaps even incendiarily, outlandish POOYA notion? I see no credible basis for believing that is so.
As for the matter of Obama existing the back door of his plane because nobody could understand/speak Mandarin, I have a few thoughts:
- First of all, the tone of the headline of the Netshark story does not align with the remarks of the Chinese ministry official the story quotes. The official indicated the problem arose because the stairway driver didn't speak English, not because nobody in Obama's delegation spoke Chinese.
"China provides a rolling staircase for every arriving state leader, but the U.S. delegation complained that the driver couldn’t speak English and couldn’t understand security instructions from the United States; so China proposed that we could assign a translator to sit beside the driver, but the U.S. side turned down the proposal and insisted that they didn’t need the staircase provided by the airport."
Be that as it may, the official's explanation is what it is, but having worked in the PRC for nearly 20 years, I'm surprised he proffered that as his explanation. It's certainly possible the driver does not speak English; however, that individual is, I suspect an exception among Chinese people under the age of about 45.
-- English instruction in China
-- 2010 -- China Embraces English Language
-- 2002 -- English Education in Present-day China
I have met hundreds of Chinese who are embarrassed that their English isn't as good as native speakers; but that's not the same as not understanding it. Among my PRC clients, literally everyone speaks English well enough to understand what I and my colleagues write and say, and they're all more than willing, using English, to respond in writing to English communications, but few of them are comfortable speaking in English. (Odd insofar as their writing is 80% to 90% of the time "good enough." Perhaps the reason they don't just say whatever they'd otherwise write derives from temporal exigencies?)
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, English is the universal language of aviation. If one must interact with airline personnel, one must speak English.
- It's preposterous that there was nobody on AF1 who spoke Mandarin and Cantonese. The WH knew Obama was going to China, and they and he know Obama speaks neither, right? If there was no translator on board, well, that'd have been the WH's oversight, not anyone else's, and problems resulting from it would have been attributable to the WH, not China or an airport staffer who drives a mobile stairway. So regardless of any possibly intended snub, AFAIC, the WH would be the one to blame for the alleged effort to snub the POTUS having succeeded, that is if it even did. (One'd need to be extremely petty to take umbrage over the POTUS using the rear exit of his own plane.)
Having read the article you linked, I think for all it presents to be wholly representationally faithful, a lot of exceptional circumstances had to coalesce. Events, "the stars," do occasionally inopportunely align, but their doing so is not typical, and all those events would have to have been to some degree both anticipated and coddled in order for the "stairway" incident to plausibly be construed as a deliberate set of acts. Even Obama, the object of the slight you allege, of the matter and its significance in essence said "yes, sure, whatever...," thus showing his own unwillingness to make something out of what was in fact nothing of consequence, regardless of whether the circumstances were intentional or serendipitous.
