MAGA Has Always Been at Peace with East Asia
Trump influencers who declared total war against China a month ago are just as pleased to see Trump back off now.
The Harris vs. Biden knives are coming out for real this week. The Guardian published some excerpts from Alex Thompson and Jake Tapper’s forthcoming book Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again last night. Former Obama and Harris adviser David Plouffe doesn't hold back, telling the authors that Harris’s 107-day campaign was “a fucking nightmare” thanks to Joe Biden’s way-too-late decision to drop out. “He totally fucked us.”
Happy Tuesday.
Just Kidding About All That
by Andrew Egger
Having been dead against the whole pointless trade war with China from the beginning, your Morning Shots correspondents were pleased and relieved to learn this week that the White House had suddenly decided to largely lay down arms. No more pointless economic devastation! No more annihilation of U.S. small businesses! No more idling ports and empty shelves! The news wasn’t great—a 30 percent tariff is still a heavy barrier, one that will cause no end of needless economic friction—but it isn’t as calamitous as before. After a full month of the U.S. government beating the U.S. economy with a stick, it sure feels good to have them stop.
So that’s why we liked it. Why’d all these MAGA guys like it?
After all, the White House and its MAGA cheerleaders spent early April proclaiming that the time had come at last for a major economic showdown with China. On April 10, after Trump suddenly dropped his “Liberation Day” tariffs on most of the world while cranking them to near-embargo levels on Beijing, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent insisted that isolating China had been the plan from the beginning: “This was [Trump’s] strategy all along. You might even say that he goaded China into a bad position,” he told reporters. “They have shown themselves to the world to be the bad actors.”
Days later, the Wall Street Journal reported that a keystone of the White House’s trade strategy was “to extract commitments from U.S. trading partners to isolate China’s economy in exchange for reductions in trade and tariff barriers imposed by the White House.”
At the time, MAGA influencers ate all this up with a spoon. On April 9, former Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary took to CNN to wave a bloody shirt in support of an all-out trade war to “squeeze Chinese heads into the wall.”
“Nobody has taken on China yet, not the Europeans, no administration for decades,” he said. “Finally, an administration—you may not like Trump, you may not like his style or rhetoric—finally an administration that puts up and says, enough.”
The soundbite went mega-viral on the right. “This is the hardest shit I’ve heard in the 10 years of MAGA,” influencer and failed congressional candidate Andrew McCarthy tweeted. Donald Trump Jr. shared it with three “100” emojis. So did the account Libs of TikTok. Charlie Kirk played the clip at the top of his radio show.
The calls to battle stations went on across the MAGArati. “China is the testing ground for the World Economic Forum’s vision of a future totalitarian state,” posted Benny Johnson. “China must fail—Trump knows this. This is more than just a trade war.”
“I’m really excited that we are rallying Americans to be anti-China,” wrote Laura Loomer. “It’s about time that we wake people up to the fact that the CCP is our enemy.”
This week’s announcement brought all that to a screeching halt. As both sides agreed to pull back tariff barriers, Trump hailed the thaw as “a total reset . . . in a friendly, but constructive manner.”
All that stuff about wielding U.S. economic power to isolate China on the world stage? Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick waved it off this weekend as “fake news.”
“I mean, we are focused on Americans, right? . . . We are not under any circumstances focused on China when we’re talking to other countries,” he said, adding that now the objective was simply “to de-escalate.”
What commitments had the Evil Empire to the east made to get America to call off the dogs? None whatsoever. “Apart from the tariff rollback, neither side announced any broader concessions on the substantive trade issues that weigh on the U.S.-China relationship,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote yesterday.
And whither the influencers? Surely the voices that were so overjoyed a month ago to see the U.S. throw hands against China at long, long last were equally dismayed to see Trump back off, right?
Kidding, obviously! Benny Johnson, Charlie Kirk, and the rest had no words of sorrow to share about the zigzag yesterday. Libs of TikTok praised the China news as “EXACTLY WHAT I VOTED FOR.” “Markets ROAR After China Bows to Trump,” Johnson enthused.
The rules of the MAGA media ecosystem are simple: The enemy is whoever Trump says it is on a given day, for whatever reasons Trump sees fit to suggest. The hero is always Trump, whose intuition is the stuff of legend and whose every move, however contradictory to what he’s done and said before, is an act of genius.
The Act of Tyrants. The Stuff of Nightmares.
by William Kristol
In a furious video posted last night, Tim Miller characterized the Trump administration’s immigration policy succinctly: “Absolutely depraved.”
Tim was struck by Trump’s Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau going to Dulles airport in Northern Virginia yesterday to personally greet 59 Afrikaners arriving under an exception to President Trump’s ban on accepting refugees fleeing persecution. “I want you all to know that you are really welcome here,” said Landau to the Afrikaners, who were flown here on a flight chartered by the State Department.
Around the same time yesterday, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem was telling thousands of Afghans living lawfully in the United States that they’re no longer welcome here. These Afghans, fearing persecution by the Taliban, had applied to come to the United States and had been carefully vetted by U.S. authorities before being admitted. But Noem is confident they’re not at risk if they’re now sent back: “Afghanistan has had an improved security situation, and its stabilizing economy no longer prevents them from returning to their home country.” And so the Trump administration will end their temporary protected status with the intention of deporting them.
The nonprofit group #AfghanEvac, which helps Afghan families resettle here, called the move “unconscionable” adding: “What the administration has done today is betray people who risked their lives for America, built lives here, and believed in our promises.”
Meanwhile, the Trump Justice Department is in court urgently seeking to overturn a judge’s order blocking the administration’s move to end temporary protected status for over 500,000 Venezuelans legally in the United States. These Venezuelans are contributing to society and they have a lower crime rate than native Americans—but that means nothing to the Trump administration. They prefer the exciting prospect of mass deportation.
Also yesterday, from Dalton, Georgia, we got an update on the case of Ximena Arias Cristobal, whom I wrote about last week. Local authorities announced they were dismissing the traffic charges against the Mexican-born college student after the Dalton Police Department and the city’s prosecutor reviewed dashboard camera footage of the traffic stop and determined that the officer had stopped the wrong vehicle.
But Ximena, who’s lived here since she was 4 years old, nonetheless remains detained at the ICE detention facility in Lumpkin, Georgia, and still faces deportation. You’ve got to give the Trump administration credit: When they have a chance to deport a college student from a family who’s been here for 14 years, paid taxes, and obeyed the law—they take it. The Biden administration, much maligned for its immigration record, wanted ICE to focus on arrests of serious criminals, national security threats, and the most recent illegal arrivals in the U.S. But now, thanks to guidance from the Trump administration, ICE is racing to deport people who’ve lived and worked peacefully in this country for many years and have no criminal histories.
In short: The Trump administration is deporting innocent people who’ve been living here since they were 4 years old. The Trump administration is seeking to deport Afghans who fought with us and came here legally. The Trump administration is expelling Venezuelans who fled communism who came here legally. And the Trump administration has shut the gates to all refugees seeking to come here—except for some white Afrikaners, who are flown here on a State Department plane.
It’s idiotic. It’s wrong. It’s un-American.
And yes, it’s depraved.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Trump’s China ‘Deal’ Is Bad Economics and Bad for Democracy… It will leave us with higher prices, less trade, and a too-powerful executive branch, argues MATT JOHNSON.
Trump’s Unquenchable, Unconstitutional Greed is Deforming America… From Qatari jets to meme-coin dinners, a perverse masterclass in profiting from the presidency, observes JILL LAWRENCE.
Nobody Dresses Anymore… Earmark an hour for a musical escape into the world of classical music, led by MONA CHAREN and JAY NORDLINGER on The Mona Charen Show, no coat or tie required.
JD Vance Is A Moron When It Comes to India-Pakistan… The vice president backtracked from his “none of our business” stance on world affairs after getting informed from people who actually know what they’re talking about. His careless comments and isolationism highlight a troubling lack of understanding and responsibility during a potential global crisis. BEN PARKER and JOHN AVLON discuss it all on How to Fix It.
Planes, Tariffs, and Price Controls… On a bonus episode of The Secret Podcast, SARAH and JVL talk about Trump’s $400 million Qatari plane, the stupidity of the Chinese “deal,” and the weird way in which price controls are only “socialism” when a black lady proposes them.
Quick Hits
FUN WITH MONEY: As Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” to fund the government takes shape, the president is telling fiscal hawks who oppose a package that worsens federal deficits to maybe just chill.
“This week, the Republicans are meeting in the Tax, Energy, and Agriculture Committees on major pieces of ‘THE ONE, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL,’” Trump said yesterday. “Now, with the tremendous Drug and Pharmaceutical Cuts, plus massive incoming Tariff Money, our ‘GREAT, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL’ just got much BIGGER AND BETTER.”
Trump is reiterating a strategy he has been signaling for months. Deficit hawks have blanched at all the goodies Trump wants to pack into his bill, which would renew the tax cuts from the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and introduce a host of new distortionary tax cuts like exempting tips and overtime pay from taxation. Why demand all that be offset with real spending cuts, Trump argues, when you could just fudge the numbers by suggesting it’ll be paid for by tariffs?
The idea is sheer monopoly-money budgetary malpractice. Trump can’t seem to find a tariff rate he’s willing to keep steady for more than a few weeks at a time—how could anyone plausibly game out how much revenue his various trade wars will bring, let alone build out a tax policy apparatus that relies on such assumptions? But the goal isn’t to get to a deficit-neutral bill: It’s to create a sense of plausible deniability around the bill’s actual fiscal effects to sap the hawks’ will to fight. Will it work? Probably!
SAYONARA, HONDA: In the wake of “Liberation Day,” Japan was among the first countries to rush to Washington to try to hash out one of the trade deals the White House insisted were ripe for the taking. But no deal has materialized, and the New York Times reports that the damage is piling up in Japan’s auto sector:
On Tuesday—one day after the Trump administration agreed to temporarily nix most of its tariffs on China—two of Japan’s top automakers issued dire profit forecasts, weighed down by billions of dollars in losses linked to U.S. car tariffs.
Honda Motor said that its operating profit would fall nearly 60 percent for the fiscal year that began in April. The Japanese automaker, which produces a large amount of the vehicles it sells in the United States in Canada and Mexico, attributed the downgrade to a whopping $4.4 billion hit it expected from tariffs. . . .
In Japan there is a sense of disbelief and indignation among business leaders and government officials that the Trump administration backed down on China tariffs, while maintaining punishing levies on allies like Japan with significantly smaller trade imbalances.
MORE PAIN IN ACADEMIA: In yesterday’s Morning Shots we noted that the real damage being done to academia was the massive amounts of federal funds that were being yanked from their research budgets. We spotlighted an internal Florida State University email as evidence of how scrambled even the big public universities were. Well, yesterday, a tipster sent us another internal note, this one from the University of Arizona.
The email, from the university’s research, impact, and innovation department, noted that as of May 2, 67 awards totaling more than $60.3 million had either been terminated or placed under a stop order. The grant money for those awards had come from a wide swath of agences: the National Science Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, USAID, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, the National Institutes of Health, the National Cancer Institute, and more.
The source who passed along the email noted that these numbers have likely increased in the days since it was issued. The larger picture remains the same, however: Major incubators of research and academic studies are seeing a huge spigot of funding just dry up. And other countries seem to have noticed. Here’s a very newsy item from last week that seems to have evaded national attention:
The European Commission has launched a new initiative to attract researchers and scientists to the European Union—especially those from the United States. The Choose Europe for Science program, backed with more than half a billion dollars, is designed to offer an alternative to researchers who have been forced to seek new opportunities following cuts in scientific funding imposed by President Donald Trump’s administration.
The program will invest €500 million ($568 million) between 2025 and 2027 to recruit specialists in various fields of knowledge to come and work in Europe. The initiative also includes a target for member states to allocate 3 percent of their GDP to R&D projects by 2030.
By the way: Are you privy to public universities having to make major research cuts? Do you have internal documents to share? We have a secure tip line for you. Click HERE.
—Sam Stein
Cheap Shots
"The Harris vs. Biden knives are coming out for real this week. The Guardian published some excerpts from Alex Thompson and Jake Tapper's forthcoming book Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again last night. Former Obama and Harris adviser David Plouffe doesn't hold back, telling the authors that Harris’s 107-day campaign was 'a fucking nightmare' thanks to Joe Biden’s way-too-late decision to drop out. 'He totally fucked us'."
And so we're off, on a topic that will become food for thought and debate for a long time to come, as the book excerpts and the book itself begin to make the rounds and enjoy their moment in the sun. There may be some, even a lot, of truth in this latest round of Democratic self-flagellation as people become experts in the fine art of hindsight. But I'm also old enough to remember all the way back to last year, and I don't recall the Harris campaign to have been a fucking nightmare, a fucking bad dream, a fucking bad day, or even a fucking bad moment. I remember it as something that on its worst day was still far, far better in both word and deed than what we've got now is on its best day. Sure, there were some missteps. But that is inevitable in any campaign that tries to please too many people in too many ways, and under some extraordinary circumstances.
It was a mistake for Joe to run again after inferring or stating (call it whichever you prefer) that he would serve as a transitional one-term chief executive, sort of his version of "Read my lips, no new taxes." But Biden too on his worst day still was better than what we've got now on its best day. Lots of good things were accomplished by his administration, something annoyingly and inexcusably forgotten as Democrats buy into the conservative narrative that everything he touched was bad, wrong, and unpopular and twist and contort themselves into that pretzel as if they have no values and no backbone of their own. I can guarantee you that Harris' fucking nightmare campaign was way more respected and appreciated around the world than most of what the current leadership is saying and doing. But let's forget all that as we race to recast her, the shortened electoral run, and Biden's record of success in office as the reason why we are in this mess when, from where I sit, the real reason is an electorate that wants to be entertained more than governed effectively, and is far less literate on the issues and far more stupid in its approach to selecting its political bosses than most people are willing to say out loud.
I miss competence. I miss humanity. I miss the willingness to do the hard work of real governance that gets long-term results more than short-term headlines and media coverage. Take the Newark airport fiasco as an example. If only we had had a President who had come up with some sort of infrastructure plan to address obsolete technology and other needed upgrades and put them into place before reaching a crisis point and a major safety risk. And if only we had appreciated that more at the time. And now. If only.
Bill: "It’s idiotic. It’s wrong. It’s un-American. And yes, it’s depraved."
Yes, and it's what a plurality of the great and good American people wanted. Once you give up any and all hope that the voters are reasonable and decent people, you'll feel better.