Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal flamed Donald Trump in yet another critical editorial, this time accusing him of “making it up as he goes,” with his tariff decisions hurting the United States and its allies.
“You almost have to smile” when the president claims the shuddering economy is “all going according to plan,” scoffed the editorial Thursday.
The “reality is that Mr. Trump is making it up as he goes, and it would help if he had an actual strategy to deal with China.,” the newspaper added.
Instead, Trump is “outright punishing the allies he needs for a coherent China strategy. He’s imposed tariffs on Canada and Mexico and insulted Canadian national pride. He’s hit Japan with 24 percent tariffs, South Korea with 25 percent, and Europe with 20 percent. He’s hit Vietnam with 46 percent — though the boom in that country’s exports to the U.S. since his first-term tariffs has come at China’s expense,” The Journal noted.
He has imposed a gargantuan 145 percent tariff on products from China, while pausing most of his other global tariffs for 90 days, the newspaper acknowledged.
But at the same time, Trump is doing Chinese President Xi Jinping “a favor by refusing to enforce a law passed by Congress” demanding the sale of TikTok by Chinese-controlled owner ByteDance, argued the paper. Last week he extended the deadline for a TikTok sale by “another 75 days after China walked away” from a near-deal, The Journal added.
Trump is also refusing to impose sanctions on Chinese firms that buy oil from Russia and “thus help Moscow’s war machine,” noted the newspaper.
Trump’s “ad hoc, scattershot tariff policy won’t solve” the trading imbalance with China, The Journal added. “So far he’s hurting his own cause and country more than he’s hurting the Chinese Communist Party.”
