Posted on 05/13/2025 3:44:58 AM PDT by karpov
The temporary30% on their goods and 10% on our goods rollback is a major temporary win for Trump.
The globalist open borders, free traitors Wall Street Journal has gone full TDS and more importantly, full globalist and full enemy of American sovereignty.
Any Trump-Chinese tariff agreement must have the Chinese banning shipments of Fentanyl precursors to the Mexican cartels. The CCP/Xi know exactly which Chinese companies are making these shipments and must act. Trump must get this done, then use it as propaganda against the do nothing Dems.
Trump shut down the border, now he must shut down the Chinese fentanyl precursors.
Yep. Agreed. High stakes negotiations are sometimes unpleasant. The whole point was to make others tariff and non-tariff barriers go away. It’s working. Nice work Mr. President.
Yep, WSJ has always been rabidly anti-tariff, which as an old-school economist, I’m sorta, but shifting.
Coverage of this has been horrible - all the press say Trump /USA backed down - NOT TRUE. China enters negotiations with even a weaker hand than they had before - and they only started with a pair twos
I see we have people on this forum (including the jag-off who started the thread) who clearly think this is the American public being played for fools by the Carnival Barker Trump who is doing it for simple political gain.
Let me be frank-you people are imbeciles.
What "shortages?" WSJ believes that whatever dogma (backed by the MSM) its editorial board writes needs no explanation?
WSJ went off the leftist deep end a long time ago
The MSM is running this spin everywhere this morning. Now we see why none of these people would ever be good business people. It was always about getting China to the negotiating table. If anything they blinked. Trump got exactly what he wanted. The MSM will always be giving the opposite of reality! 🤦🏻♂️
HOPE HE TOLD THEM TO DITCH THE LEAD IN TOYS.
I appreciate the change in tone and the change in commitment.
What? Trump didn't change anything. It was Zelenskyy who backed down and signed the deal.
But the Democrats have to frame it as "Trump caved" or something.
If a father scowls at a child who misbehaves in order to get the child to behave properly, and then the father softens his tone when the child apologizes and improves, do we say that the father "changed his tone" or did the child make the change?
Did President Trump cave on tariffs or did China blink and agree to concessions warranting a change in punishment?
-PJ
None of the above.
Trump achieved the goal of having tariffs on American goods reduced and maintained a 10% tariff on Chinese goods entering our country. China reduced tariffs on American goods and certain other restrictions to maintain trade.
You can call it blinking but it was in fact negotiating
My take from May 11, a couple of days before the deal was announced, that tends to explain why the president must inevitably negotiate with one eye toward upcoming midterms which could spell the effective end of his presidency and with the other eye on his ultimate long-term objectives. Inevitably, his maneuvers might appear chaotic or ad hoc under these conflicting pressures:
“ We want to see, for the good of both China and the U.S., an opening up of China to American business.”
Wanting the good, even negotiating to establish the “good,” is nice; it is certainly good public relations or propaganda, but it should not be the overriding strategic goal of the US.
The overriding goal should be reestablishing the relative strategic condition of the US to be superior to China’s, both economically and militarily. This necessarily requires securing our supply chain for critical raw materials such as rare earth minerals, pharmaceuticals and chips. Ultimately, it means restoring America to its primal mercantilist position on top of the world and, if possible, the relative degrading of China’s industrial capacity.
In this statement, Trump reveals his sensitivity to permitting these negotiations lapsing into a race to the bottom. It for no other reason than looming midterm elections, the negotiation process must present potential for upside to both parties if a dismal spiral is to be avoided.
That is the scenario that is playing out to some degree around the war in Ukraine with both sides claiming the other side is losing the race to survive unacceptable losses. In this propaganda contest, neither side can be trusted and both sides claim the most outrageous set of facts and certainties.
The scenario must be avoided in this negotiation process with China, but it is equally necessary that we truly understand our endgame needs. Those needs are not to keep the music playing for big-box retailers with cheap Chinese toys for Christmas. Those needs do not require the shoring up of the stock market for Goldman Sachs. But they do include establishing confidence among the investment class that it is safe to invest in America long-term in ways that will ensure America’s dominance militarily and industrially.
To ensure America reestablishes its place inevitably means that China must be relatively diminished, but, as Trump’s remark reveals, that implicit goal must not be openly maintained or internal domestic politics on both sides will simply crash the negotiating process. Carrots as well as sticks must be dangled in exquisite balance. Finally, it is critical that we conduct the negotiating process mindful, not of short-term Goldman Sachs issues, but mindful of the precarious state of our national debt and the equally precarious state of the bond market. A critical concern that further explains Donald Trump’s quoted remark.
We have the immediate need to refinance a significant portion of our $37 trillion national debt within the coming months and we have a long-term goal of converting America into a mercantilist nation, strong in trade and deterrence. We must understand that everything pivots around our debt crisis, and everything concerning the debt crisis pivots around a functioning bond market. That means that, as we try to restructure America’s and the world’s trading system to our advantage, we do so because we are broke and we must do so while keeping the bond market vigilantes at bay.
This is a daunting challenge that requires high-wire balancing talents that must at least show promise by the midterms. Unlike the war of attrition in Ukraine that has no fixed judgment date, the Chinese are no doubt aware of the implications of our midterm elections and so they would normally be inclined to delay and obstruct negotiations as much as possible but, conversely, they know that, not unlike Russia, they have massive internal pressures and with real dangers of an imploding economy if their external trade juggernaut is capped by any such delay.
If the critics claim that all this is typical of chaos in Trump’s world, we know that Trump has a very small needle to thread, under great domestic pressures, with scant margins and snares on all sides. Small wonder he must shift positions, or at least emphasis, as he necessarily pursues so many conflicting objectives.
Whoever is writing for the Wall Street Journal is insane.
I hate Paul Gigot.
It’s actually 30% on all goods - 10% baseline plus 20% fentanyl. Also, the 25% for steel and aluminum, from his first term, is still in affect. Since the lefties have spent decades killing our steel industry, most of it comes from other countries. All steel and aluminum in any form, from China, Mexico, or Canada to the US is hit with a 55% tariff. 35% for everyone else.
We need to bring our steel production back online, but it will face radical lefty resistance.
The Murdochs are horrible Commonwealth meddlers in the US.
Exactly…..These clowns have no choice but to spin this. They have been saying were going to crash the economy and have inflation destroy Americans. Inflation down to 2.3 in April … YTD budget surplus is a trillion. Entirely predictable from the media. China admitted they ignored all trade agreements while Biden was in charge and now China is in a position of having to obey them and likely to make these concessions permanent because they were going to feel far more pain than us. TDS is very contagious.
Common symptom of TDS.
The WSJ fails totally here in their analysis. Trump did exactly what he wanted with the tariffs and got or is getting what he wanted.
It’s called the art of the deal.
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