‘Bring me my tariffs’: how Trump’s China plan was 40 years in the making
Both Xi Jinping and Donald Trump’s political careers were shaped by their formative experiences in the 1980s – and, above all, their encounters with Japan
In 2011, Donald Trump spoke before an audience of about 1,000 in Las Vegas, teasing a prospective, if fanciful, presidential run. Halfway through a rant over Middle East policy and oil prices, he digressed for a moment on trade with Asia: “China, I said the other day – very, very hard to buy anything, outside of China. Certain other countries also, but China’s, you know, the one.
“And somebody said: ‘What would you do? What could you do?’ So easy. I drop a 25% tax on China. And you know, I said to somebody that it’s really the messenger. The messenger is important. I could have one man say: [falsetto] ‘We’re going to tax you 25%.’ And I could say another: ‘Listen, you motherfuckers, we’re going to tax you 25%!’”
“We’re a debtor nation. Something’s going to happen over the next number of years in this country, because you can’t keep on losing $200bn … and yet we let Japan come in and dump everything right into our markets. It’s not free trade. If you ever go to Japan right now and try to sell something, forget about it, Oprah. Just forget about it. It’s almost impossible. They don’t have laws against it. They just make it impossible. They come over here, they sell their cars, their VCRs, they knock the hell out of our companies.”
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