China Reminds: He's Just a Bully

"Trump is a classic bully who craves submission and fears conflict. His fervent supporters want him to be Michael Corleone, but he's more like Biff Tannen. Standing up to Trump does not mean that you win. But giving in guarantees that you lose." -- Jonathan Chait

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Jonathan Chait's postmortem on Trump's trade war with China provides insight into the President's psychology -- meaning that it will offer a partial road map to anyone with the misfortune of having to deal with him.

(The sooner that the people he calls his followers and the rest of his party include themselves in that category, the better for them.)

Chait reminds us of the blusterous start of Trump's War on World Trade, and points out how fruitful it was for other countries to comply with his infantile demands:

Most of the world accepted this advice, only to discover the difficulty of making global trade deals with a president who doesn't seem to understand how trade works. Foreign diplomats expressed repeated frustration as they failed to ascertain what Trump even wanted from them, let alone what he was prepared to offer in return. To date, only the United Kingdom has managed to resolve its trade status with the United States. [bold added]

Note that Americans lost: We now pay higher taxes on imports from Britain than we did before.

The only other country to make any headway so far is now China, which did not comply:

China, however, retaliated with countermeasures of its own, imposing steep tariffs on American imports. Trump decided to make an example of the country. "Based on the lack of respect that China has shown to the World's Markets, I am hereby raising the Tariff charged to China by the United States of America to 125%, effective immediately," he announced on Truth Social. (This figure eventually increased to 145 percent.) Other countries, which had showed proper respect, would receive a merciful reprieve. "The world is ready to work with President Trump to fix global trade, and China has chosen the opposite direction," claimed Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

Trump held out for one month before backing down. Under the new 90-day agreement, tariffs on Chinese goods will come down to 30 percent; China's tariffs on American goods will likewise decline to 10 percent... [links omitted]

Trump's people are trying memory-hole this latest episode of all hell breaking loose, not to mention the decades of "ripping off." (In January of 2018, we had been paying a mere 2.2% tax on imports from China, so Americans are getting screwed by Trump here, too.)

The real strength of Chait's piece is something I hope Americans catch onto sooner, rather than later:

This makes for an unusual style of governing, to say the least, and even a decade into the Trump era, the president's targets often respond with confusion. But the evidence suggests a fairly clear pattern: Although Trump instructs his targets to submit, doing so merely sets them up for more humiliation and abuse.

Following are parallel examples from closer to home.

-- CAV