Trump's delusions are about to blow up in his own voters' faces

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Greg Sargent Retweeted:

@ThePlumLineGS the job of embassy polit affairs officers is to know the politics of the host country, so they target while Trump bellows, yet another example of heck of a deal-maker Opinion | Trump’s delusions are about to blow up in his own voters’ faces

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The Plum Line • Opinion

Trump’s delusions are about to blow up in his own voters’ faces

By Greg Sargent July 9 at 9:05 AM [link:[e-mail]|Email the author]

THE MORNING PLUM:

With the exception of the big, beautiful wall that is already being built on the southern border (in President Trump’s mind, anyway), the issue that taps most directly into the most visceral strains of Trumpism is his escalating trade war with China. Given how often he preens about his “toughness” toward China before roaring, worshipful rally crowds, it’s hard to see how he’ll back down, no matter what the consequences.

Numbers provided to me by the Brookings Institution suggest that those consequences will most directly impact the counties that voted for Trump. Indeed, the numbers show that China has taken aggressive steps to sharpen its targeting of Trump counties in the latest round of retaliatory tariffs it just announced.

This morning, Politico reports on the backstory leading up to Trump’s trade war. Trump has been ranting for decades about other countries “ripping off” the United States on trade. Now that hostilities are escalating, Politico notes that Trump has “no clear exit strategy and no explicit plans to negotiate new rules of the road with China, leaving the global trade community and financial markets wracked with uncertainty.” But Trump loyalists say he’s playing a long game and won’t buckle. As Stephen K. Bannon puts it, Trump “has preached a confrontation with China for 30 years,” making this a “huge moment” that pits “Trump against all of Wall Street.”

Despite this phony populist posturing about Trump targeting “Wall Street,” Trump counties are the ones most likely to take a hit. The Brookings Institution, which keeps detailed county-by-county data on employment by industry, looked at all the counties that have jobs in industries that China is targeting, and broke them out by counties that voted for Trump and Hillary Clinton. Brookings provided me with this table showing the results:



Nearly two-thirds of the jobs in industries targeted by China’s tariffs — a total of more than 1 million jobs — are in more than 2,100 counties that voted for Trump. By contrast, barely more than one-third of the jobs in China-targeted industries — just over half a million — are in the counties that voted for Clinton. (This is based on 2017 county/employment data.) This doesn’t mean those jobs will definitely be lost; it means that they are in industries that are getting caught up in Trump’s trade war, making them vulnerable, depending on what happens.
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Greg Sargent writes The Plum Line blog, a reported opinion blog with a liberal slant — what you might call “opinionated reporting” from the left. Follow https://twitter.com/theplumlinegs

[Gothmog]

1. China and the EU are targeting trump's base in this trade war

[bigbrother05]

2. This illustrates that he sucks at negotiations

The only deals he knows how to make are in real estate when he has a clear advantage in money and power.

In anything like a fair fight, he will always come out on the losing end, but he never pays the price because he gambles with other people's money/lives.

[Crutchez_CuiBono]

3. On point.

[Snellius]

4. In war arrogance & ignorance combined are always a fatal weakness

Trump always deludes himself that he's the smartest guy in the room, in his case, the world. Especially among the Chinese or Koreans who he considers an inferior race. He's now being outsmarted by those very nations he assumed were too stupid to ever successfully fight back. "Trade wars are easy to win". While he blanketly throws up walls and trade barriers on general commodities with no tactical thought, his adversaries are carefully sniping at strategic weak points that they know will do the most damage. In the military history of this kind of warfare the Chinese wrote the book.