'This is war, actually': Expert explains how 'Trump is picking up where Biden left off'

24 April

President Donald Trump with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on February 21, 2025 (Wikimedia Commons)

Former Bank of America strategist David Woo said Thursday President Donald Trump's tariff policy is much more than just a trade war, calling it "very combative."

"I think this is much more than just a trade war. I think this is war, actually," he said on the Odd Lost podcast, adding that "it is not surprising the way it is gone, because in a way, the whole thing has been heating up under [former President Joe] Biden."

"Trump is picking up where Biden left off," Woo continued.

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Woo, who previously served as the head of Global Interest Rates, Foreign Exchange, Emerging Market Fixed Income & Economics Research at Bank of America, said under Biden, the most important thing, in terms of Visa VI China, was the "punishing sanctions in terms of the ability of China to be able to access semiconductor advance conductors and in manufacturing equipment for advanced conductors."

"All that was meant to basically give the US two to three year head start in AI, semiconductors, in automation, robotics and so on and so forth," he said.

Woo noted that a month after Trump became president, Chinese AI startup DeepSeek was launched, which raised concerns among the new administration. "Basically it was a massive piece of news. I mean, it was a game changer." he said.

In January, DeepSeek launched its first AI chatbot along with the DeepSeek-R1 model. It has attracted interest for claiming its Large Language Models can compete with or even exceed the performance of established leaders in the field, such as OpenAI.

"Deep Seek news for me, is no proof of China's technological prowess, but it is proof that AI can be easily copied," Woo explained.

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He added that anything that could be copied is worth nothing commercially, which is why the Trump administration had a sense of urgency in containing China.

Woo added that Trump has brought "a lot of China hawks" into his administration, for whom there was a deep sense of urgency to do something about China's growing global influence.

According to Loo, the U.S. officials believed that if they had more time with China, they could have taken a different approach, but the DeepSeek news sparked a feeling that they needed to stop China immediately. Ultimately, they see the only way to achieve this as bankrupting China economically which is what Trump's trade war is all about, he said.

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