During his time in office, former President Donald Trump made a lot of noise about waging a trade war against China.
However, writes New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait, Trump by the end of his first term had grown desperate to forge a trade deal with China that he could tout during his reelection bid that he would go on to lose against President Joe Biden.
"While Trump began his presidency as a snarling trade warrior, bent on ending Chinese manufacturing dominance, he ended his presidency as a whimpering apologist for Beijing," Chait writes.
As evidence for this, Chait points to a recent interview given by former Trump national security adviser Robert O'Brien in which he acknowledged that China did not live up to its end of the bargain that it struck with Trump to buy $200 billion worth of American-manufactured goods.
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“I think people were generally happy with phase one, but as it turned out, the Chinese didn’t honor it," O'Brien confessed.
According to Chait, this admission renders Trump's entire first-term trade war with China as a "total failure" that also bodes ill for a potential second Trump term, in which Chait predicts that Trump would spend more time fighting with longtime American allies and not standing up to global autocracies.
"Trump has been attacking American allies as parasites since 1987," he notes. "As president, he relentlessly trolled American allies as supposed freeloaders. He specifically resents Germany for being able to manufacture cars. 'See the millions of cars they are selling in the U.S. Terrible. We will stop this,' Trump reportedly said at one disastrous NATO meeting."