- BREITBART - FRANCES MARTEL - APRIL 5, 2023 -
Chinese Communist Party censors allowed users on its state-controlled site Weibo to comment extensively on the arrest of American former President Donald Trump on Tuesday, resulting in many cheering on the decline of the United States and predicting a civil war.
Trump was arrested and arraigned in Manhattan on Tuesday, indicted on 34 charges of fabricating business documents. The charges stem from alleged money paid to adult film star Stormy Daniels, according to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. During remarks late Tuesday, Bragg claimed that the alleged fabrications were related to attempts to “cover up crimes relating to the 2016 election.”
Trump, shown in multiple polls to be the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, described the charges on Tuesday as “massive election interference at a scale never seen before in our country.”
“This fake case was brought only to interfere with the upcoming 2024 election. And it should be dropped immediately,” he asserted.
Weibo, the most popular Chinese regime-approved social media site in the country, had the news of Trump’s arrest on its front page as of Wednesday morning Eastern time, flooded with thousands of user comments. As the Chinese government strictly censors any content it considers contrary to Communist Party ideology or the interests of dictator Xi Jinping, observers can consider the thousands of reactions to Trump’s arrest still publicly available to be consistent with Beijing’s stance. Many of the comments furthermore echoed propaganda in the pages of the Global Times and Xinhua News Agency, two of China’s biggest government-run propaganda sites.
Some comments, as translated by the BBC, predicted that Trump’s arrest would be the beginning of a “civil war” in America. Other users described the charges as “political persecution.” The Washington Post also documented the civil war predictions and noted that several commenters appeared to believe that Trump had already been convicted of the charges and would serve 136 years in prison (Trump faces a maximum of 136 years in prison but is unlikely to be sentenced so harshly if convicted). According to the Post, a Weibo hashtag on “Trump’s 136-year prison term” received 400 million views by Wednesday afternoon local time.
“I bet he will run for presidency again when freed at age 231,” one commenter joked.