Short-Fused Don Bullies and Blusters into an Unwinnable War with Seasoned Bully Beijing
By Tom Kagy | 08 Apr, 2025

Engaging in regular bullying of small neighbors in the South China Sea, Xi recognizes Donald Trump as a bully who has underestimated his victim.

Like much of the world Xi Jinping recognizes Donald Trump as a blustering bully with a penchant for making outlandish promises, backing off them, and declaring victory anyway.

Xi, and Beijing's leadership in general, are bullies too.  But they have the good sense to keep the bluster to a minimum.  They do their bullying by quietly positioning assets until the victims are completely surrounded, helpless and defeated before any shots are fired.  And Chinese leadership in general takes a much longer view than Donald whose timeframes seem based on weekly TV news cycles.

By imperiously seeking to punish China by bumping its tariff's to 104% Tuesday — an absurd action on the face of it — Donald has placed himself — and, unfortunately, the entire US economy — into a lose-lose trade war with the world's second largest economic power, one whose industrial capacity is about 80% greater than that of the US.  The question here isn't who will win.  The answer is obvious from the outset: both nations will each lose  perhaps a trillion or two dollars worth of asset value and economic activity over the next few weeks as this pointless drama plays out.

The question is who will end up salvaging a strengthened position for future competition for economic and political influence over the world.  The answer to that too is obvious from the outset: Beijing will emerge as the victim who stood up for free trade against an American protectionist bully.  In addition to the US and Chinese economies the big loser will, of course, be Donald Trump.  

Within 2 days of his inaccurately named "reciprocal tariff" proclamations, the US stock market had already lost $6 trillion.  The 3 - 4% drop in the value of the dollar added another $1 trillion to those losses for American business and individuals.  There's no telling how much US industry lost due to uncertainty as to whether to continue production in Canada, Mexico, China, Vietnam, etc.  

It's safe to say that even if Trump's tariffs manage to bring $100 billion a year into the US treasury — albeit mostly from US consumers forced to bear the brunt of the cost as though it were a sales tax, the most regressive form of taxation known — he would have cost the US economy at least a full order of magnitude more in losses.

And of course Donald's precious approval rating took a 7 - 10% beating from the tariffs. That beating will worsen until more than the current eight GOP senators and handful of GOP congressmen join with democrats to reverse Trump's usurpation of congress's power over tariffs.  And as more and more Americans discover that their favorite cheap clothing, electronics, appliances, sporting goods and toys have now become 20 - 50% pricier, Trump's approval rating will take progressively bigger beatings.  

In his half-century-outdated world view Donald was apparently seeing China as an easy victim with nothing to offer but cheap trinkets.  Another clear indication of the bubble Trump inhabits is having a flunky who refers to Chinese as "peasants" in public interviews.  Both Trump and this flunky are about to discover that China's production of everything from EV batteries to solar panels, steel electronics, industrial machinery and rare-earth metals isn't something the US can match even in ten years or ever, especially after Trump's deportations of hard-working migrant population that might have been willing to work those incredibly tedious assembly-line jobs.

So by calling Trump's bluff Beijing will likely set Trump up to be a Uuuuuge loser.  

When I consider the developments of the coming days and weeks, even as a part of me bemoans the losses to the US economy, the long-term damage to America's prospects in the world order, and losses to my own personal stock holdings, another part of me is anticipating with childlike glee the match of the two bullies, the two fattest kids in school belly-bumping until one falls and cries uncle. 

Unfortunately for us Americans, there's little doubt who that is likely to be in this particular bully belly bump contest.