Author: admin

In Donald Trump’s first term, my Brooklyn-based activist group had the peculiar dynamic of being started by two men while being composed of about 65% women. Since November 2024, our group has doubled in size, and the gender imbalance has tipped even further: we are now about 80% women.

Almost 18 months into Trump’s second term, it is abundantly clear that the appetite for anti-Trump, pro-democracy activism has not dimmed at all. And yet, there is a substantial portion of the populace that, in my experience as an activist, seems to have lost its fervor for the fight.

If I see two other men’s faces at one of my group’s events, it feels like we’ve had a pretty good masculine turnout. Bigger events like the No Kings rallies feature more men, but nearly everywhere we go under Trump 2.0, there is a notable paucity of men. “When we look at the demographics of Resistance 2.0 there is overwhelming consistency,” writes Dana R Fisher, who studies civic engagement at American University. “Participants are predominantly white, highly-educated, female, and middle-aged.” During Trump’s first term, things were similar: Laura Putnam and Theda Skocpol reported that women comprised “70% of the participants and most members of the leadership teams”. There is also a well-documented gender gap in Trump support.

So where did all the men go, and how can we get them on board?

Some men have veered right. Some have burned out, their engines flooded by a terror that the work of protecting democracy goes on and on, world without end. Some have retreated to tend their own gardens: work, children, art, vinyl collections. (I will refrain from offering any gender-related thoughts about who might be better acclimated to the prospect of thankless, all-important work.)

Underscoring all of these is a quiet belief held by some men – especially white men – that however bad things may get – and have already gotten – in the United States, however much everything from the Dobbs decision overturning abortion to ICE violence may make for a crueler, uglier country, they will personally remain OK. Too many have a metaphorical sign up in their cubicles that reads “Your Emergency Is Not My Crisis.”

And it is a vicious cycle: the more women and non-binary people do the overwhelming majority of resistance work, the more men take in the wrong-headed message that this work is not for them. The truth is, the arrival of any new man in these spaces is cause for celebration. My co-leaders and I have a special emoji that we reserve for a new man joining our group.

Here we have arrived once more at that place organizers like myself regularly find ourselves: the junction of what should be and what is. Should men need personalized invitations to participate in the work of building a better world? Absolutely not. But do men need to be invited? Seems like the answer might be yes.

The women leading this work everywhere I go are heroic in their courage, their vigor and their determination. But I am a resolute believer in the big-tent approach to political change, and making sure that 50% of the population plays a role in this fight is crucial to assembling a pro-democracy majority in a moment of unprecedented peril. We need everyone right now, and men are conspicuous in their absence. (Next up: people in their 20s.)

My unscientific conclusion is that the men who have already drifted away, whatever their reasons, are unlikely to come back. Instead, now is an ideal time to extend an invitation to the men in our circles who hover on the edges, shouting fruitlessly at their TV screen or social-media feed, not knowing yet how much good they can do – or how much better they will feel – if they take action.

My co-leaders – six women – and I have recently gotten to thinking about what we might do to break men out of their morass of hopelessness and torpor. Working on the principle that you should always ask a busy person if you want to get something done, we have been targeting fathers of school-age children for deeper immersion in our work. I became an activist because I could not stomach abandoning my children to the collapse of American democracy. And while not every father is a viable candidate for us – I don’t think we are going to win JD Vance over – we at least share a common language. The future is the place where our children will live.

Perhaps it is time for men like me to organize spaces where men can take a tentative first step toward participating in the communal and organizing work that is the lifeblood of a country under terrible strain.

This past Sunday, I hosted about half a dozen men at my apartment to eat pizza, drink beer, and talk about our experiences. Some of the men had already been doing this work for years; for others, the pizza and the beer were their first step forward. We ended our get-together with a concrete request: reach out tonight to three men you know are frustrated by the state of the country, and ask them to join you for the next activist work you plan to participate in. If we want to triumph over the forces of authoritarianism, we will have to do it, painstakingly, one person at a time. Draft those invitations.

What’s giving me hope now

Last Friday, our group hosted a May Day picnic in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park that eventually transformed into an evening Shabbat dinner. More than 100 people came by over the course of the day, including 25 new members who joined our email list after the event. Sharing challah and frittatas and chocolate chip cookies on a balmy evening with old friends and new ones, grizzled organizing veterans and fresh-faced newcomers, was just the uplift I needed. As strangers, we are doomed. Building community is how we will keep democracy alive.

• Saul Austerlitz is the author of How to Assemble an Activist

Air Force One will land in Beijing on May 14. President Trump expects to land with leverage in his briefcase. He should think again.

On May 4, U.S. Treasury Secretary Bessent appeared on Fox News to plead with China to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz and relieve pressure on the international oil markets. While Bessent was busying himself on Fox News, China was busy making friends by supplying those in distress with much-needed oil and other commodities.

This story goes back further than the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. In December 2018, the long arm of Washington reached into Vancouver International Airport to order the arrest of Meng Wanzhou — the CFO of China’s telecommunications giant Huawei and the daughter of its founder — over Iran-sanctions charges. Six months later, Washington put Huawei on its Entity List and cut China off from the U.S. semiconductor supply chain. Beijing snapped to attention. Fearing that Washington could one day choke off other critical resources, Chairman Xi quietly built one of the world’s largest commodity buffers. For example, Beijing amassed a 1.4-billion-barrel strategic crude reserve, roughly 115 days of seaborne imports.

Fast forward to today, China is deploying its stockpile to supply those in distress with much-needed commodities, including oil. Sinopec and Sinochem have been reselling West African crude to refiners across Asia. On the gas side, Chinese majors have resold a record 1.31 million tons of LNG so far this year to the likes of South Korea, Thailand, Japan, Indonesia, and India. Beijing has been lending a hand to its Asian neighbors while the U.S. has been doing the opposite with its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. The diplomatic dividend is exactly what one would expect: Seoul, Tokyo, and Jakarta have all sent Beijing a thank-you note and pivoted away from Uncle Sam.

When we move away from physical molecules to the realm of diplomacy, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi flew into Beijing on May 6, where he was warmly welcomed by Foreign Minister Wang Yi. That same week, China’s Foreign Ministry openly dismissed Secretary Rubio’s threat of secondary sanctions, calling the U.S. measures illegal unilateral actions that lacked U.N. authorization.

While Washington raises walls, Beijing is opening doors. On May 1, Chinese tariffs on imports from all 53 African countries with which China holds diplomatic relations plunged to zero. Europeans now enter China visa-free. India’s Modi government is fast-tracking minority Chinese investment in seven strategic sectors. China’s DeepSeek AI went open source, giving the world’s developers free access to a frontier Chinese AI model. While Washington is tightening export controls on America’s AI enterprise, China is open for business.

And then there is Beijing’s ace: rare earths. Beijing’s control of neodymium, praseodymium, samarium, europium, gadolinium, and yttrium oxides is virtually total. Every advanced weapons system, every electric drivetrain, every wind turbine, every smartphone in the United States runs through China’s critical materials. To replenish its weapons stockpiles that have been depleted due to America’s proxy war against Russia and its open warfare against Iran, the U.S. Department of Defense now needs Beijing’s permission to restock. The rules of the road are being rewritten, and they are being rewritten in Beijing.

The verdict is in. The Alliance of Democracies’ Democracy Perception Index, which was released on May 8, puts China’s net global perception at +7%. Meanwhile, the international perception of the U.S. has collapsed. Two years ago, it sat comfortably at +22%. Today, it has plunged to a dismal -16%. It is clear that Trump will be tiptoeing through the tulips with Xi and coming home empty-handed.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

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President Donald Trump’s tumbling approval ratings are raising the odds that the 2026 midterm elections will extend one of the most powerful trends in 21st-century American politics.

The president’s steady decline in popularity has increased the chances that Democrats in November could recapture the House of Representatives, and maybe the Senate too.

If Democrats flip either chamber, it will continue the extraordinary run of volatility that has seen control of the House, the Senate or the White House change hands between the parties in 11 of the 13 elections since 2000. By contrast, control of either congressional chamber or the White House flipped in just five of the final 13 elections of the 20th century and only seven of the last 20 stretching back to 1960.

Each time voters recoil against the party in power, political analysts usually focus on the immediate choices made by the president and his party in Congress. But the pattern of rapid reversals has become so entrenched that it appears driven less by tactical decisions than by deeper forces in the economy, society and the electorate that show no sign of abating.

“Five or six years from now, if we are having this conversation, it will probably be 14 out of 16 elections with people voting for change,” said Doug Sosnik, a former White House political adviser for Bill Clinton, who has tracked the trend.

Part of the explanation for this volatility is that whenever they do win power, both parties usually have only managed to scratch out small majorities. These smaller majorities leave them with little cushion for the midterm losses that have always been common for the president’s party.

“The midterm loss phenomenon is not new to the 21st century, but often the party in power absorbed the losses” and preserved its majority, said Brandice Canes-Wrone, a Stanford University political scientist and senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution. Now, she said, “the majorities are so tight” that even small reversals flip control.

A similar dynamic is evident in the White House’s revolving door. Each party has reliably locked down so much of the Electoral College that small shifts in the handful of swing states now decide elections.

But while narrow congressional and Electoral College margins can explain the frequent shifts in power, that raises another question: What explains the narrow margins?

In their book “Identity Crisis,” UCLA political scientist Lynn Vavreck and co-authors John Sides and Michael Tesler, argued that the 2016 election culminated a long-term shift in the basic conflict between the parties from economic to cultural issues. Around polarizing questions including on immigration, racial diversity and LGBTQ rights, they wrote, Trump tilted the axis of political debate “to competing visions of American identity and inclusiveness.”

“For most of our lifetime, politics was contested over the New Deal issues —the size and role of government,” Vavreck said. “Those days are so gone. We are not (primarily) fighting over the tax rate anymore. In 2016, Trump raised these identity-inflected issues (and) now … we are fighting about who deserves to be an American.”

A political order grounded in such clashing visions of the nation’s identity, Vavreck and her colleagues argued, makes it harder for most voters to envision shifting their support from one party to the other. When “the differences between the parties in the early 1990s” centered on the role of government, more voters who leaned toward one party could imagine living in a country governed by the other “and not hate it,” she said.

“It wasn’t a personal and divisive existential crisis about what it means to be an American. So now that it is, it is harder for voters to make that crossover,” Vavreck said.

Amid these changes, political professionals largely agree that the combined share of the electorate immovably locked down for either party has grown through the 21st century to around 85% or even slightly more, reducing the number of swing voters. (In “Identity Crisis,” the authors memorably called this the “calcification” of American politics.)

Paradoxically though, the large number of voters firmly anchored in either party has increased the clout of the smaller group that is not. Swing voters tend to be the Americans who place less priority on the cultural and ideological firefights between the parties than on their own immediate economic circumstances — about which they have been persistently negative for years.

“That last 15% is dissatisfied, disengaged, not in the cultural wars, and are pretty much voting against whoever is in power,” said Sosnik. Those disaffected voters, as I’ve written, increasingly express their discontent not only by switching their vote, but also by whether they vote at all.

Micah Roberts, a Republican pollster who is part of a bipartisan team that surveys economic attitudes for CNBC, said voters who don’t strongly identify with either party “are consistently pessimistic.”

“There is not a year since 2017 when independents were positive about the current state of the economy,” Roberts said.

Economists and political strategists agree that many voters, especially those without a college degree, feel it has become far more difficult to get ahead than it was for their parents, as income inequality has widened since the 1970s. Josh Bivens and two colleagues at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute recently calculated that the incomes of average families would be as much $30,000 higher today if workers at the very top had not claimed such a growing share of total national income since then.

“Rising income inequality is the main reason that affordability feels out of reach for too many U.S. families,” they wrote.

The slowdown in wage growth has frustrated working families for years and contributed to the 21st century’s endemic political instability, most analysts agree. But the sharp spike in inflation after Covid-19 raised these concerns to a crisis level. Instead of treading water, many families now feel they are slipping beneath it. Though other economic indicators such as the unemployment rate and stock market are positive, Roberts said, today “the only economic report that ordinary, everyday Americans pay attention to is the price on the gas station billboard or the price at the bottom of their grocery bill.”

Those frustrations boosted Trump in 2024 when Democrats were in the White House, but now that undiminished anxiety looms as the biggest 2026 threat for Republicans.

“We’re a quarter of the way through the 21st century and neither political party has figured out how to satisfy voters’ basics needs while we are playing on this new field,” Vavreck said. “This is where we are going to be probably for the rest of my lifetime.”

Shifts in presidential strategy have also fed the persistent instability. With only occasional exceptions, the presidents since 2000 have centered their legislative agendas primarily on massive partisan bills (from Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act) that they typically pass through the special reconciliation process with little, if any, support from the other party.

“Both parties now use the reconciliation process when they have full control of government to jam through their agenda on a partisan basis,” said former Republican Rep. Charlie Dent, now executive director of the Aspen Institute’s congressional program. “It’s almost as if they’ve given up on trying to pass big bipartisan bills.”

Whatever the policy merits of these highly partisan bills, the political impact has been to trigger intense opposition from the other party. Neither recent Republican nor Democratic presidents have followed a more incremental strategy of seeking to broaden their support by starting their terms with limited, bipartisan legislative plans. Even when presidents have pursued bipartisan compromises — as Biden did on his big infrastructure and semiconductor manufacturing bill — they have found that their partisan moves overshadowed that outreach.

Canes-Wrone pointed to another reason why new presidents now stir immediate backlash: They are deemphasizing legislation at all in favor of advancing their agenda through aggressive executive action. “It is very easy when you are operating more unilaterally to overreach,” she said.

Cycles of such sustained instability have been rare in American politics. In the 20 years before the Civil War from 1840 to 1860, ten of eleven elections produced shifts in control. Many political analysts find even more similarities to the period from 1876 to 1896, which saw eight change elections over eleven.

Like today, that late 19th century stretch was defined by wrenching changes — the transition from an agricultural to industrial economy, fierce battles between management and labor, and rapid urbanization, all punctuated by a massive immigration wave. Then, as now, many voters saw the two parties as incapable of delivering economic and social stability amid the tumult.

What could break today’s cycle? Bivens, like Sosnik, believes that politics is unlikely to stop shaking until living standards for average families more steadily improve. The catch-22, Bivens says, is that implementing policies that might generate such broadly based gains will require one side to hold power for a longer stretch than now seems possible.

“In order to make the big policy change to get us out of the trap we’re in … it would require a sustained period of governance, which would require a lot of popular support, and popular support on a sustained basis is really hard when you haven’t solved the problem,” Bivens said. “How to solve that timing problem is a real conundrum.”

Canes-Wrone is more optimistic that a president who focused on incrementally building support with a moderate agenda intended to reassure and gradually solidify swing voters could construct a more lasting advantage. If a new president “didn’t overreach, then we are in a different world,” she said. “The question is whether once you are in office you can restrain yourself.”

Sean Wilentz, a Princeton University historian who specializes in 19th-century US politics, points toward a different possible endpoint. The eras of stability when one party established a lasting advantage over the other, he noted, have almost always come after a crisis that discredited the other side and allowed a new president to expand and solidify his coalition.

The period of turbulence before 1860 ended when Abraham Lincoln and Republicans led the Union to victory in the Civil War; the late 19th-century upheaval gave way to sustained Republican dominance after the panic of 1893 undercut the Democrats then controlling Washington. Similarly, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vigorous response to the Depression powered 36 years of Democratic advantage in Washington. “Crises help make presidents one way or another,” Wilentz said.

The financial crisis of 2008, Wilentz believes, similarly offered Democrats a chance to reorder politics. But, he argued, the reluctance of first George W. Bush and then Obama to hold Wall Street and the wealthy fully accountable “blew up both parties” and ignited the free-floating populist backlash against “elites” and a “rigged system” that elevated the tea party, Trump and Bernie Sanders — and has unsettled both coalitions.

Now, Wilentz says, the political system may remain unstable until another crisis emerges that provides a future president another chance to build a more durable coalition. “Maybe that’s what we are waiting for — a shock like that,” Wilentz said. “If I was betting about the next 10 years, I wouldn’t bet against it.”

In the meantime, the safest bet is that voters will continue ricocheting between the parties, searching for answers neither seems able to provide.

One member calls for a Presidential Medal of Freedom for a baker who refused to create a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.

Another calls for court interventions by the Department of Justice on behalf of Amish parents fighting New York vaccine requirements and Catholic nuns challenging that state’s requirement that they accommodate hospice patients’ gender identities.

And the chair of the Religious Liberty Commission is calling for a federal hotline with this automated recording: “There is no separation of church and state.”

These are just some of the recommendations that members of the advisory panel formed by President Trump last year want to see included in the commission’s final report.

That report is still in the works, but commissioners had an opportunity to describe their wish lists during their most recent meeting in April. There was little dissent as the commissioners, most drawn from Trump’s base of conservative Christian supporters, covered the items they want in the report.

Their ideas reflect the prevailing perspectives on the definition of religious liberty among many conservative Catholic and evangelical activists: increasing avenues for religious expression in public schools, expanding opportunities for faith-based organizations to receive public money, and allowing for religious-based exemptions in areas ranging from labor law to classroom lessons to healthcare mandates.

Such views have also been reflected in Supreme Court decisions issued in recent years by its conservative majority.

Commission’s views criticized

Critics of the commission say it embodies a one-sided perspective of Trump’s supporters and is threatening a well-established constitutional separation of church and state.

A lawsuit by a progressive interreligious coalition argues that the commission fails to comply with federal law requiring advisory panels to feature diverse members and viewpoints.

The lawsuit echoes criticism that most commissioners are conservative Christian clerics and commentators; one is an Orthodox Jewish rabbi. The coalition says members have asserted that America is specifically a Judeo-Christian or Christian nation and notes that most commission meetings took place at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, an institution with Christian leadership.

The Republican administration is asking a federal court to dismiss the lawsuit. The government is citing legal technicalities and contending that the law does not define how a commission should be fairly balanced or whose viewpoints should be represented.

Another entity created by Trump — the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias — issued a report saying Christians faced discrimination under the administration of President Biden in areas such as education, tax law and prosecution of antiabortion protesters. Progressive groups said that report failed to document systemic discrimination, focused on causes favored by conservative Christians and amounted to advocacy rather than an investigation.

In a further interlocking of Trump-related initiatives, several members of the Religious Liberty Commission are scheduled to take part in a May 17 prayer event marking the country’s upcoming 250th birthday. Several also participated in a recent Bible-reading marathon staged largely at the Museum of the Bible.

Harmony and tension

The commission has mostly featured agreement among members, with one dramatic exception. One commissioner, Carrie Prejean Boller, was ousted in February after a contentious hearing on antisemitism.

Commission Chair Dan Patrick said Prejean Boller sought to “hijack” the hearing, in which she had sharp exchanges with witnesses about the definition of antisemitism and defended commentator Candace Owens, denying her record of antisemitic statements. Prejean Boller, a Catholic, contended that she was wrongly ousted for expressing her beliefs.

In other hearings, witnesses described how they defied workplace regulations that they said conflicted with their conservative religious values on gender, abortion, COVID-19 vaccines and more. Some said they were prevented, at least temporarily, from displaying a religious symbol at work or trying to sing a Christian song at a school talent show.

At the hearing devoted to antisemitism, Jewish witnesses spoke of being harassed and threatened at campus pro-Palestinian protests against Israel. The commission has also heard from Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and other witnesses.

Even so, critics said the commission mostly focused on conservative Christian and right-leaning political grievances.

The Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, president of the progressive Interfaith Alliance, one of the groups suing over the commission’s composition, said the panel’s omissions are as significant as what it focuses on.

He said the commission has failed adequately to address such issues as anti-Muslim efforts in Texas and elsewhere, and also the rise of antisemitism on the right, not just the left.

Raushenbush said he is especially worried about the commission chair’s challenging the very notion of church-state separation.

Patrick, a Republican who is the Texas lieutenant governor, repeatedly denounced a concept that is embedded in Supreme Court precedent.

“We need to say there is no separation of church and state,” Patrick said at the April meeting. “That’s a lie.” He suggested printing “a million bumper stickers” to that effect.

No one at the commission meeting disagreed.

Trump made similar comments at a prayer event at the White House in 2025. “They say separation between church and state,” he said. “I said, all right, let’s forget about that for one time.”

While the phrase “separation of church and state” does not appear in the Constitution, 20th century decisions by the Supreme Court cited Thomas Jefferson’s description of the 1st Amendment as creating “a wall of separation between church and state.” The court applied the 1st Amendment’s prohibition of any church “establishment” to the states in addition to the federal government, citing the 14th Amendment’s ban on states denying citizens’ rights.

Courts have since wrestled with how to balance freedom of religion and freedom from government-sponsored religion.

Schools, vaccines and workplaces

Patrick has advocated for prayer and Ten Commandments postings in public schools.

“I don’t have any malice towards anyone that doesn’t believe in any type of faith,” Patrick told fellow commissioners. “That’s fine. That’s what America is about. But these organizations that are pushed by some ideology and pushed by someone’s bank account who wants to remove God from our country? We need to push back.”

On other issues, various commissioners called for requiring schools and workplaces to post notices of the rights of religious expression and exemptions.

Some called for restoring full pay and pension benefits for military service members who were discharged for refusing COVID-19 vaccines.

Bishop Robert Barron of the Catholic Diocese of Winona-Rochester, Minn., called for allowing religious groups such as Catholic Charities to receive federal money without compromising on traditional church teachings about the family.

He also said Catholic immigrants in detention should have humane treatment and access to sacraments and that immigration agents should not disrupt worship services in enforcement actions. The administration last year eliminated a policy against immigration enforcement in sanctuaries, which other religious leaders said should not occur at any time.

Kelly Shackelford, president and chief executive officer of the legal organization First Liberty Institute, called for new requirements that governments pay all legal bills if they lose a religious liberty case. He said many individuals lack the money to challenge the government in court.

“That would be a huge shifting of power in favor of citizens,” he said.

Smith writes for the Associated Press.

TAIPEI, Taiwan — A resolute Secretary of State Marco Rubio took to the White House lectern Tuesday and declared the United States, under President Trump’s leadership, had launched a bold new operation to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, based on the principle that international waterways must remain free.

An hour later, Trump walked it all back, ending the complex military endeavor after less than a day.

It was just the latest evidence to America’s allies that the word of the U.S. government is subject entirely to the president’s whims. And such is the worry fueling concerns in Taipei ahead of Trump’s state visit to China this week.

Privately, senior administration officials have assured Taiwanese leadership ahead of the trip that Trump has no intention of changing long-standing U.S. policy on the island, two sources familiar with the discussions said — a stance of “strategic ambiguity” that has avoided any declarative statements on Taiwanese independence since it was coined by Henry Kissinger 55 years ago.

A White House official was definitive that U.S. policy toward Taiwan “remains the same as the first Trump administration.”

“The U.S. One China policy, as our cross-strait policies are collectively known, is based on the Taiwan Relations Act, the three U.S.-PRC Joint Communiques and the Six Assurances to Taiwan,” the official said. “There is no change to our policy with respect to Taiwan.”

But Chinese officials told The Times that their president, Xi Jinping, intends to raise the matter as a top priority, knowing that only one person — Trump himself — speaks for the administration today.

Whether Xi can leverage the intimacy of a private audience to shift Trump’s stance, potentially linking it to other U.S. objectives, is the source of significant concern here.

Taiwanese officials fear even the most subtle rhetorical change in policy from Trump could imperil a delicate status quo that has held, to its benefit, for decades. They have similarly sought assurances that the administration will follow through on a pending U.S. arms sale worth over $10 billion, which received approval from Taiwan’s legislature on Friday.

“The most serious scenario would be if President Trump were to make an impromptu statement, such as, ‘I oppose Taiwanese independence,’ particularly if he were to link this to trade, the Iran issue, or a summit agreement,” said Chienyu Shih, of the Institute for National Defense and Security Research in Taiwan. “This would constitute a rhetorical concession of substantial significance to Beijing.”

Rubio told reporters at his news conference Tuesday — with a similar confidence he expressed on the Iran file — that China understands Washington’s long-standing position on the island.

“I’m sure Taiwan will be a topic of conversation. It always is. The Chinese understand our position on that topic — we understand theirs,” Rubio said.

“I think both countries understand that it is in neither one of our interests to see anything destabilizing happen in that part of the world,” he added. “We don’t need any destabilizing events to occur with regards to Taiwan, or anywhere in the Indo-Pacific. And that’s to the mutual benefit of both the United States and the Chinese.”

Trump has suggested a willingness to shift U.S. policy on Taiwan before.

During his initial campaign for the presidency in 2016, Trump openly questioned the One China policy, drawing ire from Beijing for suggesting he might endorse Taiwanese independence. He accepted a call from Taiwan’s president after his victory and would later support significant arms sales to Taipei.

And yet, at a 2017 meeting with Xi, Trump vacillated, telling the Chinese leader he could “deal with” the Taiwan issue in “a matter of months,” according to the Wall Street Journal. The Chinese were reportedly so flabbergasted by the comment that they dismissed it as rhetorical flourish.

“There is concern that the conversation between the two leaders could veer into sensitive territory on the topic of Taiwan,” said Brian Hart, deputy director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “but there are many in the administration who would still appreciate the importance of general continuity in U.S. policy.”

U.S. support for Taiwan’s democratic movement used to be a matter of principle. Today, Washington sees it as a matter of national security. Over 60% of semiconductors are produced in Taiwan, including 90% of the world’s most advanced chips. And it is viewed as the clasp of the first island chain guarding against Chinese maritime expansion.

A robust debate between Taiwan’s Cabinet and the opposition in parliament ended Friday not over whether to accept U.S. defense equipment, but over how much to spend. The Legislative Yuan approved $24 billion in purchases — including a defense package passed by Congress in December and the pending arms sale — falling short of Taipei’s $40-billion proposal.

Anticipation for the president’s state visit is high here in the capital city, where local news is filled with questions over the influence Trump’s war in Iran might have on his appetite for supporting Taiwan.

Chinese defense analysts have seen the war as a sign of U.S. weakness. But Taiwanese defense experts have taken away a different lesson: cheap equipment from a lesser military, such as dumb mines thrown in a strait, may just be enough to paralyze a superpower.

The latest U.S. National Security Strategy, released by the Trump administration in December, emphasized the importance of support for Taiwan and the status quo.

But the Taiwanese took note that the strategy also called for an end to forever wars in the Middle East, offering little preview of the president’s sudden strategic pivot on Iran in February, launching a war few saw coming.

What Trump chooses to say in China “might be difficult to predict,” said Jyh-Shyang Sheu, a scholar of Chinese politics and military capabilities based in Taiwan.

But “in Taipei, we are still focusing on the U.S. policy,” he added, “more focusing on what he does instead of what he says.”