The feces having been hosed down the storm drains, and the drug addicts having been safely shooed off to Oakland, Joe Biden and Communist China’s Xi Jinping met in squeaky clean San Francisco yesterday for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit.

As the Associated Press reports: “It was almost exactly one year since their last encounter in Bali, Indonesia, on the sidelines of another global gathering. In addition to a formal bilateral meeting, Biden and Xi shared a lunch with top advisers and strolled the verdant grounds of the luxury estate where their meeting took place.” The only thing missing was Xi’s new boy toy and bestie, Gavin Newsom.

Oddly, that group of “top advisers” included Climate Czar and Vietnam War fraud John Kerry, who along with his boss just can’t seem to take a hint. They’re clearly of the mistaken belief that if only they keep at it, China will come to embrace so-called “climate change” just like the American Left has. Memo to Team Biden: Save your CO₂. It ain’t gonna happen. These people are throwing up a new coal-fired plant every week.

It wasn’t all idiocy, though. The two met for more than four hours, which was plenty of time for Biden to cobble together a few platitudes at a solo presser he held late yesterday afternoon. These were “some of the most constructive and productive discussions we’ve had,” he said, and he and Xi now have a commitment to “keep the lines of communication open” and a willingness “to pick up the phone.” Biden, we were told, was to speak for 45 minutes altogether — 15 minutes of telepromptered remarks followed by a 30-minute Q&A session. As it turned out, he spoke for around 20 minutes total, which included a disgracefully scripted series of four handpicked questions from predetermined news organizations.

Just to watch Joe Biden robotically move from one teleprompter screen to another, and to misread and mispronounce words, and to stare straight down at his cue cards when “answering” questions from his co-conspirators in the media — all these things make us deeply skeptical of Joe Biden’s ability to effectively articulate American interests on the world stage.

Asked if she noticed any differences between the way Joe Biden handled Xi and the way Donald Trump handled him, former Trump White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany noted that Xi used to take Trump’s calls because he knew Trump meant business. “He knew that because of the tariffs,” she said. “He knew that because of President Trump’s tough talk. He knew that because President Trump showed strength on the world stage.”

What about COVID’s origins? Wouldn’t an American president want to get to the bottom of a pandemic that came from a biolab in Wuhan and killed nearly seven million people worldwide, including more than a million Americans? According to a readout of their discussions, Biden didn’t even ask about it.

Taiwan? Xi apparently reassured Biden that he wouldn’t invade. But he also pressured Biden to stop selling military hardware to the “breakaway” republic that China has vowed to, er, reunify with the mainland.

One area of actual agreement between Biden and Xi was the resumption of military-to-military communication between the two nations, which had been suspended when former Speaker Nancy Pelosi went to Taiwan in August 2022. Presumably, this would green-light Biden’s Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman, C.Q. Brown, to surreptitiously undermine his boss just like Mark “White Rage” Milley did to Trump.

Another area of ostensible agreement was on fentanyl, much of which originates in China and which kills tens of thousands of Americans every year. Biden tried to drive home the importance of Xi’s agreement to stop poisoning Americans with the drug by eloquently noting, as only he can, “By the way, y'know, I won’t, I guess I shouldn’t identify where it occurred, but Jill and I know, uh, two people near where I live, their kids, literally, as I said, uh, strange, they woke up dead.”

One particularly bad deal agreed to by Biden was on the use of artificial intelligence in military applications. According to a report from Business Insider, Biden and Xi will agree to limit the use of AI in nuclear weapons as well as in autonomous weapons such as drones.

“This is an incredibly poor decision,” said Christopher Alexander, the chief analytics officer of Pioneer Development Group. “To begin with, China lags behind the U.S. in AI capabilities, so the Biden administration just ceded a strategic advantage. Additionally, AI helps reduce stress to improve decision-making, which is crucial in preventing a poor decision to release nuclear weapons.”

Advantage Xi.

Perhaps the ultimate reason for Xi’s visit, though, was economic. China’s economic growth has slowed considerably of late. Indeed, as Fox Business’s Susan Li noted, growth there is the slowest it’s been since the 1990s. A pandemic and an aging population will do that to a country. And foreign investment in China isn’t what it used to be. As The Wall Street Journal writes, “According to Beijing’s description of the meeting, Xi pressed Biden to lift sanctions and change policies on export controls for sensitive equipment.”

China, of course, isn’t trustworthy, so these agreements might not be worth the handshake. Lying, thieving, and cheating on agreements and obligations are practically de rigueur for the ChiComs, as with its history of intellectual property theft, and with its militarization of the South China Sea’s Spratly Islands less than a year after Xi promised not to.

If Joe Biden and his handlers could take one piece of advice away from the Xi Summit, let it be this pithy standard from Ronald Reagan: Trust, but verify. Otherwise, they’ll keep getting rolled.