Donald Trump turns up the heat on China in hostile trade war

Donald Trump. (AP photo)

TOI Correspondent from Washington: The United States and China are in a full blown trade war. MAGA Supremo Donald Trump on Monday warned that he will impose an additional 50 percent tariff on China if Beijing does not withdraw its 34 per cent retaliatory tariff on US imports. Additionally, he said, “all talks with China concerning their requested meetings with us will be terminated!”
In a continuous barrage of verbal sallies he posted on social media, Trump doubled down on his tariff attack, saying he will not budge or bend or blink on taxing China’s exports to the US unless the manufacturing superpower backs down and cuts its tariff on American exports to China.
Virtually declaring a trade war on China, the US President put the onus squarely on the export giant to defuse what has become a worldwide trade conflagration, while cutting some slack on the European Union and other nations who have suffered collateral damage.

In remarks on the hot button issue that has roiled the world, Trump said he is “open to talks with other countries if they bring something phenomenal to the table…but with China, it’s different—they’ve got to move first.” Claims of Japan, Vietnam, and other countries “desperately” reaching out to the US to defuse the situation followed even as Trump kept China in the crosshairs.
“Unless we solve the trade deficit with China, I’m not making a deal. The Chinese trade surplus is unsustainable. They’ve been ripping us off for years, and it’s got to stop….I won’t sit down with them until we fix that,” Trump told reporters on board the presidential plane as he returned to Washington DC after a weekend of golfing.
The MAGA supremo kept up a barrage of sulfurous messages aimed at Beijing while talking up American resilience to shore up the US stock market, which yo-yoed wildly, going down by another five percent when it opened on Monday and then bouncing back to +3 before flattening out for a while and then heading south again at the time of writing.
Panicked Americans, some 60 percent of whom are invested in the stock market, were told “Don’t be Weak! Don’t be Stupid! Don’t be a PANICAN (A new party based on Weak and Stupid people!). Be Strong, Courageous, and Patient, and GREATNESS will be the result!”

At the same time, the US President, called stupid and dumb himself for unleashing a tariff war — by commentator Fareed Zakaria among others — sowed even more confusion by suddenly ramping up a demand for reparation from Europe for “ripping” off the US in the past even though China was his main focus.
“We put a big tariff on Europe. They are coming to the table. They want to talk, but there’s no talk unless they pay us a lot of money on a yearly basis for the present but also for the past,” he said in a chat on his plane with reporters.
Asked if there is some level of pain in the market he’s unwilling to tolerate, Trump called the question stupid, and said he didn’t want anything to go down, “but sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.”
Without taking names, Trump said he has spoken to European and Asian leaders about the tariffs, and while they are not happy, he claimed “they know I’m right.”
“This isn’t about engineering a market selloff—no one wants that, I didn’t do this on purpose to crash anything. The markets might have to take some medicine, but it’s going to heal, and we’ll come out stronger. We’re bringing jobs back, factories back. You watch, it’s going to be amazing,” he promised.
But outside of the MAGAsphere, few Americans were happy at the developments, including some of his billionaire acolytes. Many brutally called out the fallacy of blaming the rest of the world for the trade deficit that the US has run up on account of rapacious consumption of cheap goods by Americans flush with borrowed money.