I watched the debate the other night. I watched every one of our candidates try to answer the question about China and Trump’s trade war.
They were awful.
And they don’t need to be.
What ideas do they need to include, in an answer they have to give in about 90 second?
- China is not the good buy, but we don’t have to choose between Trump and China;
- Trump is not a business wizard, in fact, he’s a TERRIBLE negotiator;
- This idiotic trade war is hurting our economy and our farmers;
- This idiotic trade war is hurting our international standing with our friends and our enemies.
So how do you do that?
Here’s how:
We absolutely must deal firmly with China, particularly with its rampant theft of intellectual property that harms American consumers and threatens innovation. But the world is a very big and complicated place, and America must deal with China from our position as the leader of the free world and the leader of the world’s economy. We can’t approach China as if we were working out a deal to slap our name on a building, or hire a carpenter to build craps tables in a casino. Let me give you an example of all the ways that goes wrong.
Donald Trump decided to slap tariffs on goods coming in from China, assuming that, because we import more than they do, it would be an easy trade war to win. But China, relying on experts instead of its gut, created a targeted response, it would stop buying soybeans from American farmers. That more focused action had a domino effect. First, because China didn’t back down, American consumers got stuck with the price tag for Trump’s tariffs, as much as $500 for every American family. Second, American farmers, who literally spent decades negotiating with China, changing their crops, buying the right equipment, and everything else, to create a multi-billion dollar trade with China, one of the few that goes from here to there, instead of there to here, lost it overnight. And the rest of us lost everything that goes with it, from the local purchases farmers make in their communities to agricultural goods and equipment made around the country.
But there’s more, and this is where negotiating “from the gut,” instead of from the head, gets us in trouble. You see, China didn’t stop buying soy beans. They just stopped buying them from us. Who did they buy them from? Russia. That means, not only are we losing market share to Russia, we’re also creating an opportunity for them to get hard currency from China, in fact probably American dollars, and that’s a flow of hard currency that reduces the impact of the sanctions we’ve imposed against Russia, sanctions aimed at reducing their access to hard currency. And that weakens our ability to use America’s position as the leader of the world’s economy to project American power around the world.
So we’re not only losing Trump’s “easy to win” trade war, but in the process, we’re losing markets and we’re losing power, all because we have a President who is so sure that his experience short-changing cabinet makers in his bankrupt casino translates to the world stage that he’s actually making America weaker.
That’s why every single person on this stage would be a better choice than Donald Trump in 2020. Because everybody here knows that, while we need to deal with China, we need to stop negotiating via Twitter and start negotiating as the leader of the free world, while we still are the leader of the free world.
This answer is packed full of ideas, from Trump’s incompetence to his dishonesty dealing with others to his prior failures. It brings in Russia and attacks the Presidency-via-Twitter. And it comes from strength, not weakness.
And it has the added benefit of actually being the right answer.
Thoughts?