WASHINGTON – A mere 72 hours after the Chinese government agreed to put a half-billion dollars into an Indonesian project that will personally enrich Donald Trump, the president ordered a bailout for a Chinese-government-owned cellphone maker.
President Trump is on the brink of a costly trade war with China in large part because he says China has stolen American jobs by cheating on trade rules.
According to Axios, senior Treasury and National Economic Council officials are hoping that Trump will cut a deal with China in the coming weeks that involves Beijing buying billions in U.S. products in order to alleviate the trade deficit. In return, the U.S. would nix tariffs designed to protect American intellectual property from the Chinese. Experts note that such a deal would do little to alter “profound structural imbalances,” and more alarmingly, Trump’s ZTE intervention could also be seen as undercutting the Commerce Department’s authority to enforce trade controls, which could subsequently “diminish the future effectiveness of such controls when applied to other companies,” per The New York Times.
Representative Adam Schiff tweeting, “You should care more about our national security than Chinese jobs,” and Senator Chuck Schumer adding, “How about helping some American companies first?”
Perhaps if some Democratic donor gives every member of Congress a copy of professor Tribe’s book, it will help the GOP reflect on whatever happened in 2016, whether it was Russian funds laundered into a superPAC or adopting a meme supported by online trolls/bots.