As many of us have long suspected, the new Phase 1 trade deal with China indicates a complete and total failure on the part of the Trump Administration. The current Administration ended up obtaining basically none of his original goals. If I can use an analogy, the following sums up what has happened between the U.S. and China since Donald Trump was inaugurated in 2017:
In January 2017, when Donald Trump took office, he stood at the bottom of a big staircase. During the past three years, he basically took 4 steps up the staircase. As he took those four steps up, Americans everywhere suffered. Farmers lost their businesses, and dairy farms collapsed. Other farmers barely stayed out of bankruptcy, and the American consumers were forced to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in tariffs. In addition, the U.S. government has been forced to pay countless millions of dollars to try and keep farmers afloat.
Trump’s Phase 1 Trade Agreement represents Donald Trump taking 2 steps back down the staircase. He’s lessoning the tariffs, and in exchange, China has agreed to buy more from us than they have recently been purchasing from us. All of the pain has basically been pointless. Donald Trump is retreating—he is caving—as the Chinese always knew he would.
So, in three years, Donald Trump has basically gone somewhere, placing lots of tariffs on China, and taken us halfway back cutting those tariffs in half, all while creating a whole lot of suffering, and all the while basically getting none of his goals accomplished. This was always going to happen because the Chinese do things long term, and they were always going to wait for Donald Trump to cave. This is because they knew he would cave before the 2020 election. All of that pain and all of that suffering ended up having no purpose whatsoever. Few things sum up the Trump Presidency like this. What a complete moron, and what an epic failure. CNN’s Fareed Zakaria sums the whole thing up nicely in five minutes: