TRUMP’S RE-ELECTION: IT’S ALL BASED ON A TRUMP LIE

…Trump’s key economic adviser, Larry Kudlow

On Fox News, Larry Kudlow had to admit that Trump was wrong and the consumers were paying for the tariffs.

I can’t help it.  I just had to comment about the latest pack of lies coming out of the president’s mouth.

President Trump has now spent hours tweeting again and again about trade.  And he’s repeating his absurd falsehood that China is paying us billions in tariffs.  This shows how much Trump “doesn’t understand how tariffs work”.

What’s possibly good for us anti-Trumpster’s, that being, most of the American public, is that this is a lie that Trump is staking his re-election on.

A long-term trade war with China now looks more than plausible.  Trump has hiked tariffs to 25% on $200 billion of Chinese goods.  China then announced it is retaliating with new tariffs on $60 billion of US imported goods.

If this continues, Trump’s lie about China paying us billions in tariffs will become a lie that is ever more needed for Trump's survival.

That’s why it’s such a big deal that even Fox News’s Chris Wallace had to debunk this falsehood.  He actually got Trump’s key economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, to admit that China is not paying those tariffs.  In fact, they are basically the same as a new tax  levied on US consumers.  Trump doesn’t seem to understand that all tariff’s eventually get paid for by the consumer, not the exporting countries.

But this lie is not just a superficial sign of Trump’s failure to understand how trade works.  It is becoming central to the political strategy he’ll employ even more, if we see more new trade hostilities.

Basically, Trump is in a serious jam on China trade issues.

Revamping the trade agreements with China was a central campaign promise.  But if Trump agrees to a deal that does not contain real concessions, that will reveal that Trump’s agenda of “toughness” is as hollow as most of his false rhetoric.  It is particularly so, if those concessions are not worth the pain that the tariff wars have already imposed on farmers, in those very regions that are crucial to his reelection.

The New York Times reports that Trump is hoping that if there is no deal, he will follow by still more tariffs, and it will allow Trump to proclaim he’s still being tough on China.  Incredibly, the Times is reporting that Trump apparently believes this will be a political winner, even if increased tariffs impose still more economic pain, and that’s where Trump’s lie comes in

Trump is telling us that the money we “take” from China in tariffs will be given to US farmers in exchange for their products, which we will then export to other countries that need them.

It’s totally unclear and confusing how this would actually work, but Trump is now set to approve another round of financial aid to US farmers hit by his trade war.  Basically, his false claim will be that continued tariffs are a good thing: So, Trump is in effect saying that he is taking money from China and giving it to his voters.

There are three possible resolutions under this plan:

• As The Post’s, Heather Long explains. We could end up with no deal and a full-blown trade war.

• Or, we could end up with a bad deal where US companies don’t get improved access to the expanding Chinese markets, and the many tariffs remain.

• Or we could get a good deal, an end to unfair Chinese trade practices, access to Chinese markets and real enforcement mechanisms.

The lie is that China is paying us tariffs that will still be necessary if one of the first two above scenarios happens.

Yes, the third option could still happen, but even if it does, Trump’s lie is still just that: a lie, and it’s obviously central to his backup re-election plan.

The point is, that the Trump backup plan just reinforces the old story that Trump has been telling us about China for years: “that China is robbing US workers blind.”

Throughout 2015 and 2016, Trump claimed that China was “ripping us off” and is our “economic enemy,” targeting us with the “greatest theft in the history of the world.”

It’s true that China has been a bad international actor and that Trump did tap into real grievances about globalization.

But as the Nobel award-winning economist, Paul Krugman notes in the New York Times, Trump hasn’t built an international coalition against all of China’s abuses.  Instead, he’s waging trade wars on multiple fronts, while alienating our key allies, and under Trump, the US is basically alone against China.  So, the issue with China is instead seen as an outgrowth of his desire to tear down the international trading order.  He has wanted, and is making the United States take on China's trade issues all alone.

Just go back to Trump’s closing campaign ad in 2016.  It depicted a shadowy globalist plot, via imagery of the Democratic Billionaire, George Soros, and all those Asian business executives, plus Democratic politicians and images of Chinese sweatshop labor.  The story is: Globalist elites are enriching themselves by pitting foreign low-wage workers against all US workers.

Before "Trumpism", the focus was to gather international allies to develop progressive trade agendas, which would include international wage and labor standards and a real investment in displaced workers.

That concept is now gone under Donald Trump.

Yes, some observers looked at Trump’s trade wars and still managed to see hints of his “supposed economic populism”, in which Trump had vowed to defy the traditional GOP economics..

But what we have with today’s Trump, he now has gone all-in with GOP plutocracy on lower taxes, as he shreds the US safety net and punts away any positive action on US infrastructure.  These were three areas where he would have supposedly defied that GOP orthodoxy, but the real story is now obvious.

Trump’s “economic” populism remains operative only in areas that satisfy his racist, nationalist impulse to exaggerate and attack other countries as enemies.  And he’s hellbent on fleecing America via immigration and trade.

It’s no accident that Trump vowed, but failed to make Mexico “pay” for his border wall, and to punish Mexico for “sending” us their outcasts while pitting them against US workers.  This is also similar to his claim about China.

Central to the whole Trump re-election tale, has always been the idea that Trump will accuse the US “elites” for going against US workers and that this alliance with elites and foreign workers is stealing from them.  He will say that he will take it all back for all of them, what is rightfully theirs.

Given all this, a failure on China trade could be catastrophic for Trump.

So, he’s just swapping all this in his new story: He’s says he’s making China pay restitution to the Americans they have ripped off for so long by forcing it to “pay” us in tariffs.

And all of that is just a very large “pack of lies”.

Copyright G.Ater  2019