The Best Friend China Ever Had

Donald Trump’s stupidity helps one nation and one nation only: China.

One thing I noticed in Mexico in my recently completed two months there was the sheer number of Chinese cars that have shown up on the market. The Chinese build cars that fit what Mexicans largely need–cheap, small cars. There simply isn’t room in Mexican cities for oversized American SUVs that project the fear and insecurity of American drivers. Mexican migrants to the U.S. certainly often get off on the American truck fetish, but in Mexico that is more regional because not all areas migrate to the U.S. equally and not all return equally with that culture. And in case, they are totally unwieldy in the cities and so not that many people drive them unless they live in their home villages and have the space to park them.

In any case, we don’t build small cars anymore. So China just rushes in and has a huge market. To me, this is classic modern America–not only afraid and hostile to the world, but unwilling to adjust our national norms in order to do logical things such as sell cars to the markets that exist in other countries.

Given the actions of both American companies and now Donald Trump, who never a saw a nation he didn’t want to threaten with tariffs–an action that only works economically if you have domestically made products to compete with the imports–why wouldn’t Colombia or Denmark or any other nation in the world start moving into the Chinese orbit? You bet the Chinese bring problems too. But their problems are orderly problems. China wants the goods and it wants to build the infrastructure to get the goods. It doesn’t care about your democracy or not so long as that happens. Given the U.S. changes government every four years and that every time the Republicans take over, fascism is that much farther along, why would’t you seek order if you were a country that China didn’t directly threaten?

Donald Trump is a complete moron. But what he does understand–and what Democrats don’t–is that there is no negative politics in attacking other nations. Americans don’t care about foreign policy, outside of Israel anyway. Joe Biden was so committed to foreign policy issues that he dropped the ball on what he needed to do domestically, all the way to the end of his term. That’s good governance in some ways, yes. But any voter who actively cares about good governance is already the most base Democratic Party voter there is. What is going to hurt Trump in the end is that the people who will most suffer from his tariff mania are American consumers. Well, it might hurt him anyway.

In the first Trump term, Trump’s big assist was to Vladimir Putin. But now? China couldn’t ask for a better result in the United States. Smart Americans will be worried about this. But they should also recognize that there’s no politics in the point.