Rush Limbaugh, the Chi-Coms, and the Long Game

Rush Limbaugh, the Chi-Coms, and the Long Game

By Jim Reynolds | www.reynolds.com

For years, Rush Limbaugh kept warning about the “Chi-Coms,” and for a long time I didn’t quite know what to do with it.

I wasn’t hostile to the idea. I just didn’t understand it. Who were these ever-present Chi-Coms? Where were they? Had anyone actually seen one? Rush talked about them as if they were everywhere—behind trade deals, embedded in institutions, shaping incentives quietly while the rest of us argued about personalities and elections.

To an occasional listener, it sounded almost cartoonish. Master puppeteers? Invisible forces rearranging the world? It was easy to shrug and move on.

In retrospect, that was a mistake.

Rush wasn’t talking about villains in trench coats. He was talking about systems—about a regime that doesn’t think in election cycles or headlines, but in decades. About a political culture that treats commerce, influence, and patience as weapons. About a state that understands open societies better than open societies understand themselves.

The Chinese Communist Party didn’t need to announce itself. It didn’t need parades or slogans abroad. It needed access, leverage, silence, and time. It needed universities eager for funding, corporations eager for markets, media eager for access, and politicians eager not to ask uncomfortable questions.

Rush saw this long before it became fashionable—or safe—to say out loud.

At the time, much of the country was still operating under the post–Cold War illusion that history had ended. That economic integration would civilize regimes. That money was neutral. That openness was self-sustaining. Rush, almost alone in mainstream media, kept insisting that this was naïve. That authoritarian systems don’t converge—they exploit.

That’s why his warnings sounded repetitive. That’s why he kept returning to the same phrase. He wasn’t filling airtime. He was drilling pattern recognition into an audience that hadn’t yet learned how to see it.

Fast forward to today, and suddenly the pieces align.

Chinese capital flows through third countries. Strategic ports are leased, not conquered. Mineral rights are secured quietly. Media narratives soften. NGOs proliferate. Universities self-censor. And places like Venezuela—once merely corrupt—become strategic hubs for hostile power projection in the Western Hemisphere.

Which brings us to Donald Trump.

Trump is many things, but above all he is a dealmaker with an instinctive hatred of bad bargains. He doesn’t need a white paper to understand leverage. He feels it. When he looks at arrangements that bleed value, that trade sovereignty for access, or that reward adversaries for patience, he reacts viscerally.

That’s why Venezuela mattered.

This was not about oil alone. It was not about drugs alone. It was about denying a hostile power a beachhead. About interrupting a slow-motion encirclement that most Western leaders had learned to ignore—or rationalize.

Rush spent decades warning that the Chi-Coms didn’t need tanks on Main Street to win. They needed us to pretend they weren’t there.

And now, with hindsight, the warnings don’t sound exaggerated at all.

Whatever else history decides about Donald Trump, one thing is no longer in doubt: he knows who the Chi-Coms are. He knows how they move, how they wait, and how they take advantage of societies that confuse openness with naïveté. And he has made it plain that he has no intention of letting them set up shop in our neighborhood.

Boom.