Trump mocked for proposing China trade war
In a just-posted campaign video, Donald Trump promises to impose massive tariffs on goods from China, which would tremendously increase the cost of living for American consumers.
The video is part of what their campaign is calling “Trump 47,” designed to paint the ex-president as having policies. He was quickly mocked.
It begins with Trump attacking President Joe Biden, claiming he is pushing a “globalist agenda.”
“I will implement a bold series of reforms to completely eliminate dependence on China,” Trump says, phasing out imports from China including electronics, steel and pharmaceuticals.
Trump also promises to “ease in a system of universal baseline tariffs on most foreign products. On top of this, higher tariffs will increase incrementally depending on how much individual foreign countries devalue their currency.”
Demonstrating that he still does not underhand how tariffs work, Trump claims his plan will bring “trillions and trillions of dollars pouring into the United States treasury from foreign countries.”
Attorney Ron Filipkowski, a former Republican, says: “Trump announces if elected that he will start a global trade war by implementing a mercantilist system. He will raise tariffs on ‘most foreign products,’ phase out all imports from China in 4 years, and punish US companies who do business and invest in China.”
In the full video posted to his Truth Social platform Trump falsely claims that when he was President “China paid to the United States hundreds of billions of dollars and no other president got ten cents, legitimately, ten cents.”
Trump was quickly mocked.
“Poor Trump doesn’t realize the GOP base has long since moved past trade and now sees Disney cartoons and unintelligible acronyms like CRT and ESG as their real enemies,” said The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent.
“Bring back Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression!” tweeted economist Paul Hughes-Cromwick.
Politico food and agriculture reporter Meredith Lee Hill notes, “this Trump proposal would also trigger new and painful retaliation against US agricultural exports to China (our biggest market), just as American farmers are trying to recover from Trump’s last trade war w/ Beijing.”
Hill also writes that “one farm state GOP lawmaker [said] to me on Trump’s new China trade proposals + the impact on US agricultural exports that rely on China: ‘it’s f—ing suicide’.” She adds that another said: “‘Rushing forward w/ political slogans’ cld seriously harm US biz + ag. We need to ‘strategically decouple’ not this.”
Journalist Robert Lusetich reminds that when Trump was in office “he had a bank account in China.”