President Donald Trump’s domestic popularity would suffer if his opponents were less delusional. His foreign policy strategy prioritises China.
Many people who have met the current US president, including some who are highly critical of him and his policies, have reported that he is warm and engaging privately. That is, his public persona is an act.
While Trump’s remark about grabbing women would disqualify him from running a listed company, his abrupt management style produces results. Four years ago his political career was broadly deemed unsalvageable. He overcame tremendous obstacles to be reelected and his first several months back in office have been highly impactful. Just ask European leaders.
What must deeply concern leaders of the US’s Democratic party about Trump is his strong support among young low-income males who are Latino or black. The reasons most frequently cited are economic concerns and disillusionment with the Democratic party. Is this relevant to SA?
What-should-be campaign themes provoke a backlash when those least well-off realise how limited their life prospects actually are. Half of SA’s 20-somethings face permanent marginalisation. Whereas a vainglorious billionaire shows how out-of-touch the Democratic party has become, the ANC’s economic stewardship is vastly worse.
Rather than pursuing ideals, leftist elites often exploit them in ways that deny upliftment paths to those in low-income communities. That someone with Trump’s profile could benefit from this shows voters are rejecting ideals in favour of solutions.
Democrats, in conjunction with hard-left leaders at top US universities and media houses, were so self-congratulatory in praising their support for ideals that they lost sight of voters’ priorities, such as public safety and well-paying jobs. Voters’ trust was squandered. Consider how the US’s top news organisations were clearly complicit with White House officials in covering up President Biden’s mental decline.
China
Over the past twenty years, the size of the US’s persistent annual trade deficits with China has roughly equated with SA’s annual GDP. If the US had not imported so much from China, job prospects for low-income workers across the US and Latin America would have been vastly better.
Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign emphasised: building a wall along the border with Mexico; making America “great again”; and China’s unfair trade practices. The first two were standard populist appeals to nationalism. Trump primarily ran that year in opposition to China downgrading job prospects for Americans.
High-spending Americans benefited from low-priced Chinese imports whereas wages of lower-income US workers stagnated as factory jobs were lost to China. This provided a gap for Trump to win over Democrats from their traditionally most-loyal demographic groups, particularly black and Latino voters.
Whereas China initially built a huge trade surplus with the US through competing on price while having less stringent environmental regulations, China has relied increasingly on subsidising its domestic companies in key sectors. If all countries did this, everyone would be worse off. Hence, international trade protocols prioritise the minimisation of such subsidising.
China’s manufacturing prowess is so formidable that it would threaten the US and Europe even if it wasn’t aggressively subsidising high-growth sectors, such as manufacturing solar panels and EVs. The US has the biggest economy but China has the largest, and the most competitive, manufacturing sector.
The US could further ratchet down its imports from China but such a transition would become increasingly expensive economically, and an aggressive US stance would push China and Russia closer. Russia is believed to have resisted sharing its most advanced military technology, such as stealth submarine technologies, with China.
Trump and his vice president heaped criticisms on the US’s European allies for good reasons and this rapidly paid high dividends. They have agreed to sharply raise their defence budgets and commitments to NATO. The new German chancellor has publicly acknowledged that Europeans have been “freeriding” on the US’s defence capabilities and, more surprisingly still, he has stated that his country can’t afford the welfare state benefits that its politicians have promised.
An American president who prioritises US interests and criticises US allies is not going to inspire favourable international press coverage. A blame-the-US bias is also in play when media commentators casually refer to the “trade war that Trump started”. While neither party is blameless, China has long been aggressively gaming the system.
The US’s abundant discretionary income has become the equivalent of OPEC’s oil exporting leverage a half century ago. It amplifies Trump’s geo-political leverage to pressure Europe, Japan, India and others to take a harder line with China and Russia. A more peaceful world suits nearly everyone − with the rulers of Russia, Iran and China being notable exceptions.
We should be mindful that anti-Trump journalists and commentators aren’t going to connect the dots between his economic and foreign policy strategies. Nor does Trump want to label his tariffs a tax. Nonetheless, as his tariffs raise government revenues, they are taxes. As they will mostly be paid by US consumers as a tax on consumption, they closely resemble a VAT tax.
An advantage of Trump’s tariffs as a source of government revenues is that they are sometimes paid by foreign nations, as when China subsidises its exporting companies. Other times manufacturers might pay or shift production to the US or a close US ally. Who pays these taxes will, to a significant extent, be determined by market forces combating distortions caused by government interventions.
Ideals
Belief in multiculturalism is admirable − until it is so idealised that it is easily exploited. Just as the ANC exploits historical injustices to justify the BEE and localisation policies which have entrenched the world’s most severe youth unemployment crisis, political elites in countries as diverse as China and Germany have exploited multicultural ideals, albeit in very different ways.
Xi and Putin are extremely ruthless and they see Western ideals, particularly multiculturalism, as weaknesses to be exploited. As a former casino operator, Trump knows people can be encouraged to delude and indulge themselves. His response to aggression from Putin and Xi is to pressure American allies to recalibrate their ideals-inspired and over-indulged delusions to support American-led solutions.
For instance, Ukraine’s best path to end the war is through forming a united front with Western leaders while having Trump coax Putin and Zelensky to negotiate. To achieve better Western unity with Ukraine, Trump resisted and then, at the right time, opened the door to the US providing post-war security guarantees.
Being quick to criticise contrasts with the humility and curiosity required to develop an informed worldview. If voters prefer indulging their idealised delusions to becoming well informed, they shouldn’t expect solutions-focused leaders to address them genuinely.
[Image: https://pixabay.com/vectors/trump-donald-trump-president-usa-3123765/]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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