Mona Charen: Verdict is in — Trump wasn’t right about China

Was President Trump right about China? No. Let’s count the ways.

One: Trump’s entire conception of the China challenge was fallacious. Trump thought the problem China posed was that it sold us too many things, resulting in a bilateral “trade deficit,” which meant that China was “winning” and we were “losing.”

While it is true that some industries lost jobs to Chinese competition over the past two decades, it is also true that other industries gained jobs due to trade with China, and lower-income consumers were particularly enriched by the abundance of inexpensive goods China supplied. So were manufacturers who were able to use less expensive Chinese imports. One in five American jobs is devoted to exports, which often rely on imported components.

Two: Trump focused exclusively on one figure, the trade deficit. He wailed that the trade deficit with China amounted to “rape” and promised that under his “America First” leadership, we would “fight for America’s blue-
collar workers.” Economists nearly unanimously consider the trade deficit to be a useless statistic .

And, under his leadership, the U.S. trade deficit was the largest in a decade — a failure, by Trump’s lights.

The data are also now in on Trump’s own “momentous” 2020 trade deal with China. Trump had imposed tariffs (taxes) on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports. China retaliated with tariffs on
$110 billion in American products. Trump incessantly claimed that China was paying those tariffs, but as a new report for the Peterson Institute for International Economics underlines, that was untrue. Trump’s import taxes were paid entirely by American businesses and consumers.

The tit-for-tat tariffs continued throughout the Trump presidency until the great 2020 trade deal negotiated with his “very, very good friend Xi Jinping.” The deal, Trump blustered, was “incredible … one of the largest deals ever.”

The actual results? It was a flop. Trump said the Chinese government would remove its tariffs. They didn’t. Trump said they would buy $200 billion in U.S.-manufactured goods. They purchased only a little more than half of that, which did not equal U.S. exports to China from before the trade war.

Three: Trump should have seized upon the golden opportunity available at the start of his term to enhance U.S. exports and rein in China — the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement. Instead, one of Trump’s first acts was to withdraw from the TPP. Sadly, the Democratic Party has also abandoned free trade.

Four: Let’s not forget the strategic and moral fiasco. Obsessed with his trade deal, Trump spent the early months of the pandemic downplaying the virus and praising Xi’s “transparent” leadership and declined to impose sanctions on China for its treatment of Uyghur minorities. As he explained to Axios, “Well, we were in the middle of a major trade deal.” Trump had earlier signaled his approval of China’s concentration…