President Donald Trump recently met with Chinese President Xi Jinping and claimed he did so to help American workers — but a group of conservatives claim he actually sold them out.
“China: They've been taking our jobs for decades — millions of jobs lost to unfair trade and cheap labor, crushing American workers,” The Lincoln Project posted on Wednesday. “Elon Musk made $178 billion last year. His largest factory is in China. Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, made over $100 million last year. iPhones are made in China with cheap labor. These companies made billions in profits exploiting American workers.”
The post continued, “Who's going to speak up for the American worker? Nobody. Donald Trump and the Republicans don't care about us. They're cutting deals with China and laughing at us. More AI to kill our jobs — they love it. They get richer, we get screwed. It's wrong, but until we stop them, it will only get worse.”
The Lincoln Project is not alone in claiming that Trump failed to promote American interests during his summit with China. Derek Grossman, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and the China-Global South Project, warned earlier this month that China is in general outmaneuvering Trump while placating him with business deals that help himself and the oligarchs who support him. Specifically, he pointed to China’s diplomatic efforts with Iran and Southeast Asian countries.
“Why does this matter?” Grossman explained, “Because showing up in Southeast Asia is more than half the battle when it comes to waging and winning the competition for influence. Washington, thus far, has shown relative disinterest in sustained high-level engagement, undermining its ability to compete with China. Without routine engagement, Southeast Asian countries become uneasy about U.S. commitments and tend to look elsewhere — such as to China — to fulfill their needs.”
He also pointed out that Trump’s tariffs have allowed China to present itself as a more reliable trading partner than the United States.
“Trump’s war in Iran and the resulting disruption to commodity flows through the Strait of Hormuz have also dealt a heavy blow to Southeast Asian economies,” Grossman wrote. “The Philippines has been forced to take particularly stark measures in response, declaring a national emergency and reducing its work week to conserve fuel. The crisis reinforces a perception that Washington is distracted and unable to stabilize global conditions when it matters most. And the region is responding: Thailand’s foreign minister recently lamented that its longstanding security ally, the United States, has done nothing to support its economy amid the fallout of the Iran war.”
Speaking with this journalist for Salon in 2019, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright explained Trump’s thinking toward China as overly-simplistic and misinformed.
“The Chinese are in fact, they are on their own foreign policy trajectory which at the moment is expanding their influence,” Albright explained. “Some of it through what they call the “One Belt, One Road” in which they are providing infrastructure as well as strange kind of loans to countries to get them on their side. That’s what’s going on, that the Chinese are in fact a rising power while at the same time we are not really explaining our policies well and/or talking about our values system.”
She added, “I think it is a very complex issue. I do think our relationship with China itself is complicated and we’re not very good at trying to figure out how to cooperate and compete at the same time. It’s obviously one of the most difficult relationships and a key one, and again, as the intelligence panelist explained yesterday, one that is out there as a very complicated situation for the United States.”