In a wide-ranging press conference on Friday morning President Trump declared a national emergency and, among other bizarre comments, lavished unfounded and dangerous praise on Chinese President Xi Jinping for China’s use of the death penalty for drug users.

Speaking in the Rose Garden, President Trump explained the difference, in his view, between laws in the U.S. and China on drugs, saying that in China:



Their criminal list is much tougher than our criminal list. Their criminal list a drug dealer gets a thing called the death penalty. Our criminal list a drug dealer gets a thing called how about a fine?



He then backed up that statement recounting a conversation he supposedly had with Xi in Argentina:



And when I asked President Xi, I said do you have a drug problem? ‘No, no, no.’ I said you have 1.4 billion people, what do you mean you have no drug problem? ‘No we don’t have a drug problem.’ I said why. ‘Death penalty. We give death penalty to people that sell drugs. End of problem.'



Responding to his own story, Trump explained his view of American drug policy:



What do we do? We set up a blue ribbon committees. Lovely men and women, they sit around a table, they have lunch, they eat, they dine, and they waste a lot of time. So, if we want to get smart, we can get smart, you can end the drug problem. You can end it a lot faster than you think.



Those remarks, far from addressing the drugs flowing across the border, instead extol China's authoritarian laws — the same laws that don't work, that undermine civil liberties, and that have been used as political bargaining tools against the U.S. and its allies.

Despite strict penalties, drug use remains prevalent in China. Indeed, several reports have made clear that even anti-drug policies that Human Rights Watch deemed "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment" haven't curbed addiction there. In 2016, for example, drug seizures, even according to notoriously unreliable Chinese government statistics, were up more than 100 percent.

Trump, who just recently signed a criminal justice reform bill, cannot possibly see executions of nonviolent and low-level drug offenses as being in line with the U.S. justice system. Trump’s comments also undermine the good work his own administration has done to combat the opioid crisis that continues to grip the country.