Sadly, I have to agree with you. Trump is not playing a very smart hand at this. This is a long term problem that took decades to develop to this point just like being over weight. It will not be solved in weeks by starvation and that tactic risks sickness of the economy just as it would for a person.
Someone asked how anyone was getting hammered in the markets. Here is how, the markets have plunged repetitively in days on trade fears and clawed their way back to where they were before the plunge. This last move was the first in two years of real gain instead of just clawing back. Retirees are harvesting bone when this happens and savers are treading water just like we did for years under barky.
Some sage will come along on this board soon and say how stupid this discussion is since, “The market is not the economy.” Absurd. They probably also believe that diversity is our strength.
Trump is playing a short term slugfest strategy in a very very long term game. One team will be exhausted before they even get a chance to win and that is not the chicoms. They can require that their people suffer and probably survive. We can’t.
Reagan breaking the Soviet Union in an arms race took longer than he was in office. The damage to US was no apparent and so we went along with it. The Soviet were on thin ice already. It takes a lot of time to swing an economy. The Chicoms are not the Soviet. It will take a lot longer to break them than two terms and a little. Trump should know this. He should also know whatever he does will be rapidly undone when the rats take over and it will have been all for ZiP.
When you enthusiastically lead a headlong charge be well advised to keep looking around to see if your troops are still with you.
A short term strategy could have long term implications if the strategy was to starve the beast of capital. They are using money to rope developing world countries into debt and project power into our own country through investments with lots of strings attached. If we can sufficiently recover and end the tech transfers, we can win this. The Chinese might be patient, but patient with yesterdays tech, the money spigot shut off, and fewer other states to pillage is a setback that makes time an enemy since a trending U.S. is only going to widen the gap. This really does remind me of Spain in Elizabeth Ist time. They were a superpower, the Pope was on their side, they had all that gold and goods stolen from the New World which they employed to try to build an empire. Their gains were through theft though, so if they were stalled and if during that time they lost the stolen advantage (in their case by frittering away the money) they would be cut down to their right size in a more or less permanent fashion.