“President Donald Trump’s declaration on March 2, 2018, that a trade war with China would be “good and easy to win” remains one of the defining moments of his four years in the White House.
That’s only because of how wrong the claim turned out to be. It deserves to live on in infamy alongside George W. Bush’s “mission accomplished” speech and Barack Obama’s “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” promise. Like those, it oversold a complex, messy policy as simple and straightforward. Trump naturally took that presidential hubris to another level, and he paired it with unprecedented policy naivety. If winning a trade war were as simple as tweeting victory into existence with fake statistics, faulty economics, and the veneer of toughness, Trump likely would have succeeded. Unfortunately, that didn’t work.”
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“Trump deserves some credit for reorienting America’s economic and foreign policies to recognize the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party to freedom around the world. But his approach—which amounted to little more than levying higher taxes on $460 billion of imports and forcing Americans to foot the bill—was an abject failure.”
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“China, of course, did retaliate. It drastically reduced agricultural imports from the United States. In 2017, the last year before the trade war began, China imported more than $19 billion in American farm goods, which fell to $9 billion in 2018 and rebounded weakly to $13 billion in 2019. Exports to other countries have been unable to make up the difference, leaving American farmers in the lurch.
The Trump administration responded by spending more than $28 billion in new farm subsidies to mitigate the totally predictable mess it made. By the end of 2020, federal payments accounted for one-third of all American farm income—as Trump’s trade war bailout was piled atop existing subsidies. Rolling back those payments will be politically difficult for future administrations, so they might be here to stay.”
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“During his first week in office, Trump signed an executive order withdrawing the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a proposed 12-nation trade agreement that was a work-in-progress holdover from the Obama administration. In 2018, Trump launched his trade war by nonsensically declaring that steel and aluminum imports from places like Canada and Europe were somehow threats to U.S. national security.
All of that made a difficult confrontation with China more complicated than it otherwise would have been. A go-it-alone strategy was meant to project America’s toughness but a multilateral approach that lowered tariffs on imports from countries that compete with China would have been more effective.
Ironically, Trump also left America less capable of standing up to China in other ways—the president was reportedly hesitant to condemn China’s takeover of Hong Kong and was unwilling to speak out against China’s abuse of Uighurs because doing so might hurt trade negotiations.”
“When a Missouri-based power tool manufacturer was facing the prospect of higher costs due to new tariffs on imported saw blades, it turned to friends in high places for help—including Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.).
Hawley has been an outspoken supporter of President Donald Trump’s destructive trade policies. In fact, he’s suggested that the president should have done more to dismantle the system of global trade. But Hawley was one of four members of Missouri’s congressional delegation to sign onto a letter sent in September 2019 asking the U.S. trade representative to grant a special exemption for SM Products, which is based in Kansas City.”
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“The tariff costs facing SM Products were also hitting many other American manufacturers since much of American manufacturing is dependent on the ability to import low-cost inputs from China and elsewhere. But while some companies were able to find members of Congress willing to lobby on their behalf before the unelected board of trade officials who get to decide which tariff exemptions to grant and which requests to ignore, most other American businesses were less fortunate.”
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“Once the tariffs were in place, the Trump administration set up a murky, confusing process for companies to request exemptions. It was, and is, a system that almost seems designed to be exploited by politically connected firms and individuals. Indeed, right from the start of the Trump trade wars, some major American steel manufacturers appeared to be exercising undue influence over the exemption process. Members of Congress have warned that the process lacks “basic due process and procedural fairness” and that it could be “abused for anticompetitive purposes.” After two years, the government’s own data suggest that’s exactly what has happened.”
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“businesses that could afford to do so started hiring lobbyists to navigate the new tariff regime. The amount of money spent on lobbying work related to tariffs increased 900 percent as the trade war was getting started.”
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“Most businesses, however, can’t afford to hire lobbyists and don’t have easy access to a sitting senator. They just have to pay the tariff bill.
These are all unintended but completely expected consequences of Trump’s trade war and his poorly thought-through plan to use higher tariffs as a cudgel against China. Not only did Trump’s trade policies run directly counter to his promises to “drain the swamp” by creating opaque bureaucracies that can decide the fates of small businesses all over the country, but they actually created incentives for the swamp to get even swampier.
In the warped reality the trade war helped to create, a company in Kansas City might not succeed or fail based on the quality of the power tools it is manufacturing, but on whether its owners know the right men in Washington.”
“The Interior Department said on Monday it had completed its environmental review for a massive wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts, a key step toward final approval of the long-stalled project that will play a prominent role in President Joe Biden’s effort to expand renewable energy in the U.S.
The completion of the review is a breakthrough for the U.S. offshore wind industry, which has lagged behind its European counterparts and the U.S. onshore industry that has grown rapidly, even during the pandemic. It also marks a key acceleration for the Biden administration that has advocated renewables growth on public lands and waters.”
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“The project had suffered repeated delays under the Trump administration.”
“Trump reshaped virtually every part of the U.S. immigration system through executive action, policy guidance and regulatory change.
In total, he made more than 400 changes to immigration policy in the last four years, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank. The Immigration Policy Tracking Project, run by former Obama Homeland Security official, Lucas Guttentag, puts that number closer to 1,000.
Biden has made fighting the coronavirus, which is still infecting tens of thousands and killing 2,000 Americans each day, his top priority. After he helps bring the pandemic under control, he plans to tackle several issues, including the economy, infrastructure, gun restrictions and immigration.
In addition to Trump’s changes, the circumstances surrounding immigration on the ground have changed, making it impossible for Biden to try to just return to pre-2016 policies.”
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” On his first day in office, Biden released a massive immigration package and signed several immigration-related executive orders to halt construction of the border wall, end a ban from some majority-Muslim nations and restart a program to protect so-called Dreamers.”
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“But Biden has yet to address a series of issues: He punted on whether high-skilled workers should be given preference if they are being hired at companies paying more money instead of through a random lottery. He hasn’t fulfilled a campaign promise to tackle the massive backlog at immigration courts that doubled under Trump. (Even with the backlog, many of those cases were denied.)
And last month, he called for a review of the so-called public charge rule that makes it harder for immigrants who rely on public benefits, such as Medicaid, to obtain permanent residency in the country.”
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“Biden will be forced to make decisions on some issues, including the closure of the southern border and granting visas to more than 100,000 foreign workers. But it’s not clear when — or if — he will act at all on others, including fighting court cases and changing the refugee caps.”
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“One of the most pressing issues Biden faces: to allow temporary migrants, such as students, easier access to visas, even though many consulates and embassies are closed. Only 43 of 233 processing centers for guests are processing routine cases, according to the State Department.”
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“Before Trump came into office, nearly 500,000 new foreign students came into the United States in a year, pumping billions of dollars into small and large schools across the country. That number slowly declined under the former president and plummeted last year.
Julie Stufft, acting deputy assistant secretary for visa services, acknowledged the problems in securing visas last week. She said her office is working to solve the problem, though those who plan to reside in the U.S. permanently take precedent. Some immigrants from select countries, including China and much of Europe, are still banned from traveling to the U.S. due to the pandemic.
Gregory Chen, senior director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the Biden administration deserves credit for pursuing many of the reforms he had pledged to do during the campaign. But, Chen said, “The jury is still out on whether they are going to be successful in implementing those policies.””
“Last year, citing the pandemic, the White House strong-armed the Centers for Disease Control to invoke Title 42, an order that closes the border in times of emergency. Though for many classes of people the border has remained totally porous —businesspeople, vacationers and even many immigrants have crossed it freely for most of the pandemic — asylum seekers and refugees have been blocked. In the months since, a record-low number of refugees have been resettled, and just about every asylum seeker arriving on the southern border, except for some unaccompanied children, has been turned away or summarily deported.
While Biden has started to reopen those processes — people in refugee camps in Mexico as part of Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” plan have begun to enter the U.S. to make their cases for asylum — there are reasons to believe that on this front, Trump’s presidency will have a much longer-lasting effect. While Trump and Miller attacked immigration in all its forms, no would-be immigrants received more attention or provoked more action than refugees. And in turning asylum seekers into political ammunition in the American fight over immigration — conflating them with illegal border-crossers — Trump broke a fragile but powerful consensus that had lasted through Republican and Democratic presidents and had kept America open as a nation of refuge for more than a generation.
Biden may yet repeal Title 42, the order closing the door to refugees and asylum seekers, though the White House has said it will remain in place while it figures out how to implement an improved processing system. But that order was not the only way Trump damaged the system. He was the first major party candidate to run on an explicitly anti-refugee platform. And he continued to wage a campaign unapologetically against asylum seekers after taking office, putting through a barrage of rule changes, regulations and legal decisions that hobbled the system before he shut it down altogether in the pandemic.”
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“Since Trump mainly used executive action — circumventing Congress — to change policy, it may not be hard for Biden to reopen the U.S. to refugees and asylum seekers over the next four years. But in the longer term, closing the political divide that Trump widened on asylum will prove much more challenging. Thanks to the last administration, asylum in the U.S., once globally reliable, has become like the carpeting in the Oval Office: something that can be torn up and remade from president to president.”
“Without making Israel earn U.S. favors with any concessions of its own, the Trump administration orchestrated a campaign of maximum pressure on Iran; declared Jerusalem Israel’s capital and opened an embassy there; turned a blind eye to Israel’s settlement expansion; recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights; promulgated a peace plan that all but conceded 30 percent of the West Bank to Israel before negotiations with Palestinians had even begun; downgraded U.S. diplomatic relations with the Palestinian Authority; drastically curtailed U.S. assistance to the Palestinian people; and perhaps most significantly, made a major effort to facilitate normalization between Israel, the Gulf states and other Arab countries.
The Saudis also got in on the action. The Trump administration gave a blank check to Riyadh to pursue its disastrous military campaign in Yemen and aided and abetted it with U.S. military assistance for Saudi operations; acquiesced in MBS’s repression at home and covered up his role in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi; and lavished arms sales on the Saudis over Congress’ objections.
If Trump made Israel and Saudi Arabia top foreign policy priorities, Biden seems intent on downgrading their importance. Much has been made of the nearly one month delay in Biden calling Netanyahu; Trump’s third call was to Netanyahu, and former President Obama reached out to then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on day one. One delayed call does not a relationship make or break. But Biden was sending a message nonetheless: I’m busy with domestic recovery and the Middle East is not a top priority, he was saying. I’m pro-Israeli, but not necessarily a pro-Netanyahu president.
Biden has also set out to put some distance between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. Candidate Biden issued some very strong words about the Kingdom on the campaign trail, describing it as a pariah nation on human rights and promising to end U.S. support for its catastrophic campaign in Yemen. Days after Biden’s inauguration, the administration declared an end to American support for Saudi operations in Yemen and pledged to review current arms sales to Riyadh. And in an unmistakable sign of displeasure with the reckless and ruthless Crown Prince, White House press spokesperson Jen Psaki spoke of “recalibrating” U.S. relations with Saudi Arabia and indicated Biden will be speaking with his counterpart King Salman not MBS.
Biden is sending an unmistakable message: We can still be friends but it has to be with more benefits for the United States. Given my focus on domestic and other foreign policy priorities, I may not have a great deal of time to focus on your problems; don’t make it harder for the United States in the region or things between us will get complicated.
Biden’s early warning signals to Israel and Saudi Arabia don’t necessarily mean he is seriously prepared to make significant changes in either of these relationships.”
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“Joe Biden is no revolutionary—at home or abroad. As a cautious moderate Democrat, he’s more interested in remodeling the house than in tearing it down. And that applies to Saudi Arabia and Israel, too. Saudi Arabia isn’t a U.S. ally; but it is an important partner—at least until the rest of the world weans itself off Arab hydrocarbons and America benefits from U.S.-Saudi cooperation on counter-terrorism. And Israel, the region’s only democracy—however imperfect—is the one state in the region that shares any real coincidence of both interests and values with the U.S., and is a subject fraught with domestic political risks for any U.S. president.
After four years of one-way street relationships, Biden is right to want to inject real reciprocity and a measure of conditionality into the U.S. relationships with Israel and Saudi Arabia. He may well succeed if he simply recognizes that these two countries need America a hell of a lot more than we need them—and if he is prepared to use U.S. leverage to advance our national interests if they force his hand.”
“even if Trump’s authoritarian bluster rarely cashed out into any real-world seizure of new powers for the president, it was far from harmless. Four years of 100-proof strongman rhetoric may have the effect of building up our tolerance if and when the real thing comes around in a smoother blend. When (at least) half of the political class feels driven by partisan loyalty to defend or downplay open contempt for constitutional limits, it’s likely to make well-planned assaults on those limits that much easier to execute. Donald Trump may yet end up being a “transformational” president, not because of the abuses he managed to carry out but thanks to the dangerous possibilities he revealed.”
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“By excusing or ignoring the 45th president’s disgraceful assaults on democratic norms, Republicans have largely abandoned any principled objection to such moves in the future. If and when an actually competent authoritarian comes along, what will their argument be? “Yeah, but our guy wasn’t any good at it”?”
“Regardless of what Trump does post-presidency, his impact on the conservative base has been profound. According to one poll, 70 percent of Republicans don’t believe the 2020 election was free and fair. That’s not all that surprising considering the leader of the party is telling his followers that the process was rigged and illegitimate. So whatever direction the GOP goes, they’re going with a Trumpian base and that might be the defining constraint for the party over the next four years.”