America First means America first. President Donald Trump’s audacious trade and tariff gamesmanship is about scrapping the rotting hulks of two eras. In so doing, Trump seeks to inaugurate a new era — a new American century. The principal beneficiaries? Us. But the world benefits, too.
China is more than a competitor. It’s an adversary. It wants to replace the U.S. as the globe’s dominant power. Who wants Beijing carrying the big stick? Monied interests don’t care. That’s U.S. businesses with facilities or ties to China and Wall Street investors. Sweatshop and slave labor have been very, very good to them. Wall Street, in particular, wants to keep the status quo. The markets have been volatile lately, indicating investor uncertainty. But the price of maintaining the status quo harms American workers and national security. Trump, a natural born fighter, is fighting for change.
Always the artist of deals, Trump means to fix America and boost its global standing. Thank the nation’s socially inbred establishment for Uncle Sam’s predicament. Its ideas and leadership are toxic. Chris Van Hollen playing kissy-kissy with an MS-13 gangbanger? Jane Fonda’s DNA is spread around.
Trump wants to terminate the establishment’s dominance with extreme prejudice. Trump is right — again. Deposing the elite and reviving America and resetting its course, domestically and abroad, are imperatives.
Whittling down China, Trump’s principal weapons are trade policy and tariffs. If the president wins, the U.S. emerges as the shaper of the rest of the 21st century.
Corporate media won’t tell you, but China is in big trouble. China’s vulnerability, which Trump seeks to exploit, is outlined by Tyler Durden at ZeroHedge. Says Durden, while U.S. and Western pols fudge about their economies’ performances to boost their election chances, Xi and his mafioso lie about China’s economy for something more serious.
[I]n China, lying about the economy is treated as a national security imperative. If there’s anything in the world that gives communists a feeling of existential dread, it’s the fear that their ideological enemies will discover proof that communism doesn’t work.
More from Durden:
Trump’s tariff actions are widely criticized by the media as erratic or poorly planned, but what they don’t understand is that uncertainty is the real leverage, not the tariffs. What seems like a spur of the moment decision or a sudden capitulation on Trump’s part can be highly effective at throwing foreign governments and corporations off balance. Globalism requires a perpetual status quo, change of any kind is like holy water to a vampire.
Ronald Reagan hastened the fall of the Soviet Union with a prodigious military buildup in the 1980s. It move swiftly on passing a continuing resolution that contains permanent tax cuts and slashes red tape, among other big ticket items. Interest rates need to tick down, but the Fed’s Jerome Powell isn’t budging despite Trump’s hectoring.)
Gordon Chang points out that the PRC has staked its prosperity on exports. China’s domestic consumer market is underdeveloped. Exports are China’s lifeblood.
Wrote Chang for Fox News, April 17:
As an initial matter, his [Xi’s] economy is stumbling. It cannot be growing at the 5.4% pace reported Wednesday for the first quarter of this year. Price data for March — the Consumer Price Index was negative for the second-straight month and the Producer Price Index was negative for the 30th-straight month — indicates the country has entered a deflationary spiral. That phenomena suggests the economy is now contracting and will do so for some time. [italics added]
Chang continues:
And it’s going to get worse. Xi Jinping, despite what his technocrats say, does not want consumption to form the foundation of the Chinese economy. In fact, consumption’s share of gross domestic product — an abnormally low 38% last year — is now falling. In these circumstances, Xi’s only way to rescue an increasingly grim situation is to export more.
The post-World War II era was defined by the Cold War. With the Soviet Union’s collapse, in came the post-Cold War era. A generation later, post-Cold War is post. We’re in a flux time.
American’s post-Cold War establishment-imposed policies and governance have eroded American superiority. That didn’t start with Biden’s laughable presidency. It took years to happen. Trump’s ascendency in 2015 challenged the establishment’s rule. Trump II picks up the fight where he left off in 2020.
Trump’s decade-long battle has been about seizing the initiative from progressives or leftists or globalists or whatever that amalgam of anti-Americans call themselves. Diminishing America is the chief aim of globalists. Xi is very much for that. Without Trump’s return, Xi counted on America’s leaders continuing to reduce the nation. He expected lax trade policies to keep Chinese exports pouring into the U.S. Export revenues won’t solve China’s internal problems, but they could help temper them.
Open trade with China — backed by Democrats and Republicans — was ostensibly meant to integrate China into the rules-abiding community of free nations. This, in part, was a product of the “end of history” nonsense concocted by Francis Fukuyama. By integrating China, the hope was that it would reform itself, assuming the contours of Western nations. That hasn’t happened. Instead, Xi’s regime is aggressive, scheming, and predatory. China’s leaders routinely talk of war with the U.S.
Per the communist playbook, China has employed guile and bluff to make itself appear stronger than it is. Not that China should be underestimated, but away from China’s coast, hundreds of millions of Chinese skirt or languish in poverty. China’s “One Child Policy” — now scrapped — has propelled China toward demographic disaster. Totalitarianism is having a ruinous effect on China’s future. China is headed for demographic implosion by the mid-2000s.
Trying to compensate for troubles at home, Xi Jinping seeks to spread China’s tenacles across the globe. The “Belt and Road Initiative” is really about exploiting and dominating other countries to accrue lopsided benefits for the PRC.
Free traders like Rand Paul can squawk all they want about how Trump’s trade policies will cause consumers to take it in their wallets. That remains to be seen. Treasury secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick are engaged in trade talks with countries, including China. The pain that analysts and talking heads say is coming may be exaggerated. That’s not to be Pollyannaish. But if Trump’s economic policies prevail, a resurgent economy may compensate in many ways.
Watching Trump, you’re watching a chess grandmaster operate. He’s playing the game with multiple goals in mind. All those years operating in NYC’s dog-eat-dog business world and having passed through the presidential meatgrinder already has prepared him to lay low China and lift up the U.S. For the country’s future, let’s root for him to succeed.
J. Robert Smith can be found at X. His handle is @JRobertSmith1. At Gab, @JRobertSmith. He blogs occasionally at Flyover.
Image: AT via Magic Studio
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