Contributor: Trump’s latest trade war with China is sorely needed

On Wednesday, President Trump abruptly announced a 90-day pause on most of his planned country-specific “reciprocal” tariffs — with the notable exception of the People’s Republic of China. In so strikingly singling out China as the focus of America’s economic and geopolitical ire, Trump was not merely clarifying that the United States views China and its regnant Communist Party as our leading 21st century threat — he was also taking yet another notable step toward fulfilling his own lifelong goal of fundamentally resetting the terms of the U.S.-China bilateral relationship.

As an “outer-borough” native New Yorker from Queens, Trump has long seen things differently than most of his white-shoe brethren and fellow one-percenters living across the (literal and proverbial) river in Manhattan. Throughout virtually his entire career, Trump has served as a “class traitor” archetype — someone who, as I wrote in an essay last year, “may hold ‘elite’ ruling class credentials, but whose hearts, minds, concerns, and general sensibilities are decidedly with the country class.” That is the essence of Trump’s nationalist-populist MAGA political coalition. But it’s also who Trump has been since his earliest interviews with the New York City tabloids and TV hosts all those decades ago.

There is no better example than trade, Trump’s most consistently held political position. In the 1980s, he was alarmed at the rise of Japan as an economic superpower, arguing that America’s trade deficit with Japan was problematic and that the U.S. should respond with crippling tariffs. (It seems that President Reagan, who in 1987 slapped a 100% tariff on many Japanese goods, was listening.) In recent decades, Trump has applied the same logic to the newer threat of China. In 2011, for instance, four years before he launched his successful presidential run, Trump railed against widely practiced Chinese currency manipulation: “They have manipulated their currency so violently towards this country, it is almost impossible for our companies to compete with Chinese companies.”

During the first year of his first presidential term, Trump directed his Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to investigate Chinese trade practices. The subsequent report was damning, and Trump implemented numerous tariffs on Chinese goods — tariffs which, to his rare credit, President Biden largely kept in place and even built upon with further levies on Chinese imports that went into effect last September.

In addition to his first-term tariffs, Trump also filed a formal World Trade Organization case against China, alleging deceptive trade practices and intellectual property theft. As Trump put it at the time in a tweet: “Today I directed the U.S. Trade Representative to take action so that countries stop CHEATING the system at the expense of the USA!”

Trump’s tariff escalation this week against Communist China — even as he paused many other tariffs to allow for bilateral trade negotiations and give jittery bond markets some relief — is a natural culmination of the work to reset the U.S.-China economic relationship that he commenced during his first term. For that matter, it is also the natural culmination of his short-lived third-party presidential run in 2000 with the trade protectionist Reform Party, as well as his 1988 “Oprah Winfrey Show” interview, where he teased a future presidential run that would focus on trade. Immigration may be the issue most readily associated with Trump’s MAGA movement, but there is no issue that has been nearer and dearer to Trump’s heart over the decades than trade — first with Japan, and then with China.

Most important, Trump has not just been outspoken on the issue of trade with China — he has been proven correct.

Ever since President Nixon’s fateful trip to visit Chairman Mao Zedong in Beijing in 1972, American elites of all political stripes promised that welcoming China into the global economy would be good for all parties involved. American consumers, we were reliably informed, would get cheaper and more abundant goods; American exporters would get a massive and exciting new market to peddle their wares; and the Chinese people themselves would soon reap the rewards of the “political liberalization” that could only come about through “economic liberalization.” This was the dominant thinking when Nixon visited China over a half-century ago, when the George W. Bush administration welcomed China into the World Trade Organization in 2001, and when President Obama hosted and toasted Xi Jinping at the White House in 2015.

Suffice it to say it hasn’t exactly all worked out according to plan.

In Shanghai in 2022, amid the communist country’s interminable COVID-19…