On China, it’s time to ask everyone: which side are you on?
The President should simplify his trade messaging with American triumph over China as the end game to all his tariff tactics
It’s time for President Donald Trump to simplify his tariff messaging and call liberals to account with a song they all surely know – a 1930s labor ballad called “Which Side Are You On.”
Old hippies know the song from Pete Seeger’s crooning in their drug-addled youth; young hipster lefties will know Seeger was the old fogey in the recent movie about Bob Dylan, A Complete Unknown. The song’s writer, Florence Reece, wrote it as diatribe against monopolistic coal companies in Eastern Kentucky, but Trump should parlay the chorus to marshal support in his trade battle against China.
For all the game show drama of the on-again, off-again Trump tariffs, the through-line is that he’s tightening the ratchet on the Communist Party of China, the greatest threat not just to the United States, but to free thought, free expression, and yes, free trade everywhere else. Those are the sides – and Trump should demand his critics declare which side they’re on.
I spend a lot of time sitting next to Trump critics on cable news. They focus only on the little tariffs affecting countries they like to visit on vacation – when the real news is his big China strategy, cinching the noose ever tighter.
A challenge of Trump’s ephemeral governing style is the distraction of the wayward daily smoke from his underlying fire. The smoke is tit-for-tat nickel duties on maple syrup swapped across the border at Buffalo – but his fire is undoing our quarter-century botching of China.
This is a place where the left and right should find common ground – and it’s fitting that Donald Trump, a life-long China critic, be the uniter, as uncomfortable it may be for some to ponder him as glue. To get over that hump, we should all first accept our own culpability.
China maliciously hulks over all the economies in the free world, a status accrued in only 25 years of trying, by stealing intellectual property, dumping product below cost, compelling slave labor, polluting the earth, and cheating on almost every promise it makes.
The original sin creating this panda-monster was U.S. Senate passage of Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China in the waning days of the Clinton Administration. Only 15 Senators opposed it, a group evenly split by party. Republican fealty to big business and the Democrats’ fetish for trans-national governance mated to hatch a parasite on the planet. Basically, it’s all our faults.
As a free trader, I was for PNTR in 2000. Today, my freedom-loving tendencies lead me to understand that only free people in free nations can, by definition, engage in free trade. No amount of commerce will make China free, and pretending so threatens the freedom of the rest of us.
Trump instinctively understands this more than any President ever has. He railed on bad China trade deals in the opening paragraphs of his campaign announcement speech in 2015, and in 2019 he warned American businesses that they needed to immediately look for alternatives to doing business in China long term. They ignored him.
When Joe Biden continued Trump’s tariffs on China, and expanded them to solar panels, EVs, and medical supplies, CEOs ignored the continuity. When Trump made tariffs the fifth item in the 20-item GOP platform in 2024, the titans of American commerce still refused to hear. When he won, they opted to polish up this quarter’s earnings calls rather than heed their fiduciary duty – and patriotic duty - to start getting out of China.
Trump has remade the GOP into a movement willing to do hard things to combat China, and he’s done so with an army Wall Street keeps under-estimating: the very blue-collar people who got screwed by decades of off-shored jobs.
Polling indicates Trump’s trade policies are most popular with voters who do not have a college degree. Pundits on cable pretend these people don’t know what’s good for them, but I think it’s the opposite. Already buffeted by a globalizing economy, these voters know which side they’re on, and they are smart enough to sense we must change course.
I grew up among these people in a hosiery mill town in Appalachia. My grandfather started working in those mills as a teenager and never left, working mostly the night shift for four decades, missing every single one of his son’s football games so that one day I, his future grandson, might be able to attend all my son’s games. Hard things and long vision came naturally to folks like him, who willed the American dream into fruition.
The people in hometowns like mine today, and in Trump’s coalition writ large, know that panty hose manufacturing not coming back to America. But they damn sure think somebody in Washington should insist that the greatest country in the world not be dependent on the most malevolent dictatorship for critical manufacturing.
Trump is the only national leader they see demonstrating a sense of urgency against China. Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren advocated tough policies before, but today they subsume those beliefs to their visceral hatred of Trump. If they really believe anything they say, they’ll come around and help him, if only on this.
Free traders on the right also have in Trump’s seriousness about China what might be our last best chance to advance freedom. Every major trading partner we have imposes more trade barriers than America imposes on them. Before this month, Corvettes made in Kentucky, headed for Germany, faced 300 percent higher tariffs than Porsches coming the other direction. Harley-Davidson motorcycles headed from Wisconsin to India faced 50 percent tariffs – while Indian bikes were hardly tariffed at all. That’s not free trade, by any definition.
If Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gets his way, and the administration uses Trump’s willingness to wag tariff threats at even our best friends, we can leverage a much freer trading world. Every partner we have – except China – needs a deal, not a trade war.
Hundreds of one-off agreements are anathema to the free trade ideologues minted in the Cold War era where multi-national frameworks made sense, but that’s the reality in an age of nationalism. The path to free trade now is strong nations bullying the fearfulness out of weaker partners – but it must be done quickly, as threatening tariffs is less risky than living with them.
Once Trump has leveled trade barriers among free nations, the next task will be to unite them all against China. The dragon is bigger and more dangerous after 25 years of PNTR and will be hard to isolate. The task may even be impossible, but it is necessary to preserve American security and the larger Western egalitarian premise – two things China will never buy, no matter how cheaply we offer them.
Which side are you on?