Morning Joe uses Fox News report to ridicule Trump's business skills in coming trade deal with China

During a discussion on bad economic reports indicating that the U.S. may be heading for a recession, "Morning Joe" host Joe Scarborough first mocked President Donald Trump's business acumen before predicting that he will cobble together a bad deal with China in hopes of slowing down the economic slide before the 2020 election.

Using a report he heard on Fox News, which predicted that same scenario, the MSNBC host noted that China knows they have the president over a barrel.

"I actually heard this on Fox News last week. somebody expressing real concern that the Chinese already know that, for Donald Trump, the only sort of economic trick he has left in his bag is to come to a resolution on the trade war with China to get the economy going," Scarborough recalled. "Well, if we all know that, then the Chinese leaders know that. Xi [Jinping] knows that."

"And so Xi will drive a harder bargain with Donald Trump," he continued. "And at the end of the day, the man who wrote a book on 'The Art of the Deal' while he was losing more money than any American alive will have to strike another bad deal with the Chinese because they know he's timing all this for his re-election."

"He's going to push the trade war as long as he can and then, as he gets into the end of 2019 or the beginning of 2020, 'Okay, let's do a trade deal with China and try to amp the economy up,'" the MSNBC host added. "The Chinese know that, so obviously Donald Trump's position at the table is going to significantly weakened and American consumers and farmers will continue to be hurt."

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