I would have put this in our China folder, but we have none! We have a folder for Iraq and Canada, but none for our biggest adversary? At any rate, this thread will at least BEGIN as a collection of my own thoughts and idle speculations then go from there.
I don't like Trump going to China, I don't think it a good idea. First, I think it presents a great danger to Trump. Let's begin with the trip. I created a map for this, below:
View attachment 1255803
Here is a map I threw together for several reasons. First of all, DC where Trump left and Beijing where Trump is presumably going are at about the same latitudes. I am guessing that it'll take Air Force One around 14 hours to make the flight. I watched Trump leaving the WH this morning to board Marine One, then caught coverage of him boarding AF1 at Joint Base Andrews. AF1 took off from JBA at around 2;15PM today, so we will say 2:30 for a round number as they probably had to circle around a bit before heading out. By my estimate then, at this time, AF1 should be somewhere over our West coast, over California heading out over the Pacific about now.
The yellow hash marks are an approximation of about where I'd guess AF1 to be for each hour flying time.
The blue numbers underneath are the absolute time by EDT. This means that I would estimate AF1 to arrive in China at Beijing somewhere around 4:30AM tomorrow (Wednesday) morning. But AF1 is also flying westward away from the Sun counteracting the rotation of the Earth, so I tried to correct for this by crude estimation. So even though Trump left at 2:30 EDT from DC and is now leaving or soon to leave continental USA for the ocean, it is still only around 3:30PM local time there.
I tried to estimate the local time by correcting for time zones (13 of them) using a time zone map, and put the local times in red above the line.
The green line is just a rough demarcation showing the IDL (International Date Line).
What all this crap means is that by the time Trump reaches the IDL midway over the Pacific, it'll still only be about an hour local time later than when he left. This is where it gets complicated. I estimated him arriving in Beijing around 5:50 local time. It is around 6:30 in the morning, Wednesday the 13th in Beijing right now, so, that suggests Trump will arrive there around 4:30PM there. My guess was 5:30PM. I tried an air travel app too and inputted the leaving location, destination and travel time too and it also came up with 5:30.
So Trump left around 2:30PM from DC on Tuesday, and will arrive in China around 4:30PM - 5:30PM their time on Wednesday. To put it more strangely, Trump left 2:30 in the afternoon, flew about 13-15 hours, and will land in China at 5:30PM only 3 hours later in the day, but a day later.
So around 1:30AM tomorrow morning EDT, TRump will be flying over Japan, and about an hour later, will be crossing over S. Korea. Since Trump will be arriving in China late afternoon their time, it'll still feel like 4:30AM to his body (jet lag), so I would guess that Trump will arrive in Beijing about 10 hours from now, will be greeted, then probably have dinner and get some rest, and the official two day summit between him and Jinping will begin the next say.
SO, WHAT IS MY POINT?
My point being that this trip was publicly announced weeks in advance. If I can figure all of this crap out just goofing around, can you imagine what someone might figure out if they had serious bad intentions for the president? China is our biggest enemy. I think it was wrong for Trump to go there, it makes him look like a supplicant. Jinping should be coming here (he's supposed to later this year), or at the very least, both Trump and Xi should meet somewhere neutral--- like maybe New Zealand. I do not believe in accidents and a lot of people in China have accidents. I hope AF1 is being protected by a squad of fighter jets and I hope Trump has protection there out the wazoo.
One last point: something like 30 business leaders went with Trump, some of the richest men in the world like Elon Musk, so I presume a big part of Trump's trip will involve using business as leverage to try to finagle his way with Xi.
arstechnica.com
