China is not America’s friend. It is not America's "partner." The 70th anniversary of China’s communist revolution is certainly nothing for any American to celebrate.

Someone ought to tell that to the president of the United States.

“Congratulations to President Xi and the Chinese people on the 70th Anniversary of the People’s Republic of China!” President Trump tweeted Tuesday.

Congratulations to President Xi and the Chinese people on the 70th Anniversary of the People’s Republic of China! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 1, 2019

Maybe the spittle-flecked pundits in the cheap seats are correct. Maybe Trump has lost his mind.

There is no good reason for the commander in chief of “the land of the free” to extend a congratulatory note commemorating the communist takeover of China. China's communists did not abolish the nation's backwardness or imperial rule. They did not even fight the Japanese in World War II. They just seized control afterward and then spent most of their newly formed nation's history mismanaging its economy and murdering their countrymen for holding improper opinions. After Chairman Mao Zedong’s death, they at least dropped the socialism part and opened up their markets to global trade so that China could pull itself out of poverty.

Trump's tweet is not unlike an American president congratulating, say, the supreme leader of Iran.

Trump and his flunkies cannot play this off as an act of “diplomacy.” This is not diplomacy. This is sycophancy. What the president said Tuesday is every bit as foul as the New York Times' cloying 1976 obituary for Mao, after whom Chinese President Xi Jinping styles himself. Speaking of which, Trump's tweet is every bit as foul as when former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg wrongly (and knowingly) insisted that Xi is not a dictator. Trump's tweet is as foul as all the other bureaucratic American lickspittles who have tripped over themselves in the past congratulating China on the birth of its current despotic regime. It is all the same. It is an apologia for tyranny and a grave disservice to the literally tens of millions of people who have been killed by Chinese communism.

To praise the People's Republic is to ignore things like Mao’s disastrously conceived "Great Leap Forward," which killed an estimated 45 million human beings through sheer incompetence. It is to ignore communist China’s history of political purges, its labor camps, its mass exterminations, and its execution quotas. It is to ignore the estimated 10,000 freedom fighters murdered in 1989 in Tiananmen Square by Chinese government forces. To commemorate the 70th anniversary is also to spit on the Hong Kong protesters today, who regularly cite American principles and iconography in their David-versus-Goliath battle to remain free from Chinese oppression.

Trump is the president of a free country whose principles of liberty are enshrined in its founding documents. He should try acting like it.