Trump Trade War?
Trade war, strong diplomacy, or both? Podcast with C.J. Mahoney. Plus: Does DEI kill at the DoD and FAA, and why can't the Dems quit it?
When Donald Trump took office in his first term in January 2017, he immediately asked his staff to bring him options for tariffs. But it was over a year later, in March 2018, when the administration finally enacted higher tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. Also that month, the first new tariffs were put in place on China—later to be gradually expanded.
In Trump II, it took his administration just two weeks from his first day in office to enact higher tariffs on China. They have started modestly with a 10 percent levy, but unlike the last time around, they apply to just about all Chinese imports. Trump backed off a loophole called the "de minimus rule" that has allowed Chinese exporters like Shein and Temu to slip in millions of packages without tariffs if they are valued at less than $800, but he says this delay is just to allow time for a collection mechanism to be improved.
Canada and Mexico both got a last-minute reprieve from higher tariffs, but that may last only a month. Trump also threatened Colombia with tariffs over taking deportees back. Bogota promptly backed down.
What remains unclear—which isn’t a surprise for an administration that is less than one month old—is how far this will go. For example, does Trump want to use tariffs just to extract limited concessions from other countries on matters like immigration, illegal drugs, and defense spending? Or does he want to use them to supplant the income tax, at least in part, with tariff revenue and eliminate trade deficits that have persisted since the Nixon Shock and the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971?
Trump gave a strong indication of intent on Friday, when he vowed imminent reciprocal tariffs on numerous undisclosed countries, remarking, "I'll be announcing that...reciprocal trade, so that we're treated evenly with other countries. We don't want any more, any less."
Subsequently, he has ordered 25 percent tariffs on steel imports.
Then there is the question of what it means for the United States and the world. Most Americans seem to agree that globalist moves like NAFTA and giving China preferential status to get it into the World Trade Organization have been harmful for America. But can we delink from China, and does Trump really want to try, or does he just want a better deal?
Notably, Chinese leader Xi Jinping, unlike his counterparts in Mexico and Canada, did not back down in the face of U.S. tariffs. Ironically, the leader who doesn’t have to face voters has seemingly less ability to acquiesce to Trump. The myths that China will surpass the United States economically and that socialism with Chinese characteristics can work in the long run must be preserved.
Whatever you think of Trump’s early moves—and I am personally a big fan—few can question that he has acted decisively in manner that is rare in the succession of failed presidencies that have marked the new century. This is going to be a wild ride.
Please see below for our discussion with C.J. Mahoney, a former deputy U.S. Trade Representative under the great Bob Lighthizer during the first Trump administration. C.J. casts some light on what Trump has in mind and where he may go with the biggest trade moves in nearly a century.
DEI Kills
Speaking with “Outsiders” on Sky New Oz, I outlined the complete state of collapse in which the Democrats find themselves, especially owing to DEI and their woke LGBTQXYZ++ fetish.
Christian Whiton: It's hard to tell. [The Democrats] just selected a new technical leader, Ken Martin, who was the head of the Democrat party at Minnesota.
Of course, Minnesota is the origin of the failed Democrat vice presidential candidate, Tim Walz, known as “Tampon Tim,” since he wanted to put, in fact, did put, tampons in boys’ rooms in schools.
But you're right. The real leader will be who is the heir apparent; who's the likely nominee four years from now.
There's surprising amount of support among Democrats it seems for Kamala Harris.
[Crosstalk: laughter.]
Gavin Newsom as well—with his state on fire literally. So the real question to me is whether they can figure out a way to talk to normal Americans, get back to speaking honestly in plain language and talk about economic issues and move away from nonsense.
But they're still talking about how they're going to have a delegate who is trans.
You know I'm actually a gay guy and I really don't like being associated with this alphabet soup—being considered an acronym as opposed to just a person. And I think most Americans, including Americans who would fit in those different groups, just, are so sick of, of the ethnic politics and the identity politics.
So if the Democrats—if they can't get away from that—then they're looking at eight to twelve years in the wilderness.
Watch the full segment on DEI contributing to Pentagon and FAA failure, as well as the public’s overall revulsion with the pinko Democrats below—from the Pacific’s finest new source, Sky News Australia.
More About Trade from Podcast
C.J. Mahoney on why Japan—our most important global ally—was much smarter about trade during Trump I than Taiwan and other countries, and what various governments can learn from this example:
Maybe there's more on the on the defense side that you could ask for from Japan. With Taiwan, it's a different case. I think the Taiwanese could learn from how the Japanese handled the first Trump administration. I always tell this when people ask, especially when foreign governments ask me for my views on how they interact with the Trump administration, that if you just look at the different ways in which people dealt with the Trump administration, some of them tried to match the rhetoric and impose retaliatory tariffs, ratchet up the tensions.
Then, you look at what Japan did. Trump hit Japan with steel and aluminum tariffs. Threatened to put tariffs on autos. What did they do? They did not retaliate on steel and aluminum. They accepted that they were going to have less steel production and they were going to be able to export less steel tonnage to the United States.
They came in with a genuine offer on agriculture. We worked out a deal and we left them alone for the rest of the administration. There were no tariffs on Japanese autos. I think to some extent of people dig in, and particularly if you look at the U S. size, the persistent U.S. trade deficit with Japan; it's hard to justify why we would have less market access to Japan than say the Australians do or somebody else that just does a lot less trade with them…
And, that's true. But if you look at the importance of the economic relationship, we're clearly a much more important economic relationship. We struck a deal with Japan where we basically got most of the market access for agriculture that we would have gotten in [Trans-Pacific Partnership], not all of it, but most of it. And in exchange, Japan got peace, at least for the duration of the first Trump era.
C.J. Mahoney on baseline strategy of U.S. tariffs enacted by Trump:
In the first Trump administration, deals that have eluded the United States for a long time, I think are all possible now. The question though is what does the president want to do? And I think he said a number of things. I don't know that the strategy is because there are different things that he can do with tariffs.
It's obviously going to be a tariff-first policy. But it's a question of what do you want to achieve with the tariffs? And he's talked about different things. You can use tariffs to raise revenue. You can use tariffs to try to protect and incubate production and manufacturing in the United States.
Or you can use tariffs as leverage to try to cut deals with other countries. Deals with market access, or as we saw last weekend, using tariffs for leverage to deal with non-trade issues like migration and fentanyl. You could use tariffs for any of those things.
The problem is that if you optimize for one strategy, it means you're going to be de-optimizing for the others.
So what do I mean by that? That means that if you want to raise as much revenue as you can with tariffs, then probably what you want to do is to set the tariff just below what's going to affect imports coming into the United States because you want to keep that import number big and you want to have the maximum revenue. But if that's what you want to do, you're not going to move manufacturing to the United States because the idea is you're not going to change trade flows. There's not going to be import substitution because you're going to be taxing the imports. If you want to have import substitution if you want to protect or incubate U.S. manufacturing, then what you want to do is have a trade prohibitive tariff, something that's high enough so that you're not going to have imports coming in. So by definition, you're not going to have as much tariff revenue. And then if what you want to do is use tariffs for leverage, the end game is going to be that you're going to get the thing you want.
In exchange for getting the thing that you want, what you, what the United States is going to give is to take the tariff down or take the threat of tariffs off the off the table. Maybe they will there will be a Goldilocks solution where they can do all of these things in the, in, in the perfect and optimal way.
But I do think that they're going to have some choices. As I said, I think it's a very strong hand, but you could overplay it. And I also think from having been involved in U.S. trade policy now for a while, I think the president, any president. has a certain disruption budget that he can use in trade policy.
Full transcript attached. Watch the full episode on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or other platforms. Be sure to subscribe for free.
Parting Shot
Elon Musk says Wikipedia is politically biased toward the Left and should be voluntarily defunded by donors.
Newsweek, a low-ratings brand that mattered as late as the 1990s, trying to ape Axios’s moron-friendly report structure, excitedly reported that the supreme leader of Wikipedia was fighting back against Musk. In reality, he is refusing to acknowledge the obvious bias at Wikipedia. The encyclopedia is fine if you want to quickly grasp the basics of, say, the War of 1812. But when any topic touches on contemporary politics, the leftwing view of pink-haired, nose-ring-having Karens in Silicon Valley prevails.
If you doubt me, take a look at the page on climate change, which reads like a Stalinist defense of a civic religion. That is exactly what climate change alarmism is—a myth about the four percent of the carbon cycle attributable to man designed to effect state control of all facets of life.
Musk is wielding that deadliest of weapons—the truth. Progressives with no skill at debating since they have never had to debate thanks to near total control of media and elite institutions are dumfounded—reacting with hysteria and derangement.
In challenging the pinkos at Wikipedia, Elon is channeling Trump. As the Russian scholar Fyodor Lukyanov remarked on the dawning Trump II era:
Trump’s appeal stems not only from fear but also from his fundamental rejection of what can be termed “post-hypocrisy.” In traditional politics and diplomacy, hypocrisy has always existed as a tool to smooth over conflicts and enable dialogue. However, in recent decades, it has evolved into the very essence of politics. The culture of silence and the obsessive smoothing of rough edges have made it nearly impossible to articulate or address real contradictions.
In the modern Western framework, issues are no longer framed as competing interests but as a clash between “right” (embodied by the Western model) and “wrong” (those who deviate from it). This absolutist approach leaves no room for compromise. What is deemed “right” must prevail, not through persuasion but through force. The triumph of post-liberalism has turned international discourse into a confusing puzzle, where terms lose their meaning, and words become disconnected from substance.
In this context, Trump’s bluntness acts as a reset button. By stripping away the pretense, he forces discussions to focus on tangible interests rather than vague value-based rhetoric. His preference for reducing complex issues to material terms may oversimplify the world’s intricacies, but it also makes conversations more concrete and, paradoxically, more meaningful.
Domino Theory
