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When President Trump raised tariffs on China in 2017 - economic soundness aside - the media commentary initially lambasted it as unprovoked xenophobic aggressio

When President Trump raised tariffs on China in 2017 - economic soundness aside - the media commentary initially lambasted it as unprovoked xenophobic aggression. But the outrage soon died down as people looked at the numbers and saw it was a mere reciprocal setting of our tax rate to match or reach a fraction of China’s (and hopefully would enable future lowering negotiations). Now, in 2023, President Biden has maintained that course and the public has come around to more hawkish policy. Popper’s Paradox on the geopolitical scale.

yamtaddle 4y ago
Pushing back on China, economically, has been broadly popular for a long damn time. It's just unpopular-among-actual-voters neoliberal trade policy, which has been the consensus policy of both major parties for decades, that's kept us from doing it—Trump, very notably, was the first major party Presidential candidate to run since probably some time in the '80s, on a platform with such a strong anti-neoliberal stance. The media were freaking out about the trade restriction on China, but my circle of D-voting friends and I (and I'm about as libby-lib as a lib can lib) who mostly hated Trump were like "fucking good, more of this please". I think he mostly caught at least as much shit as he deserved over his shenanigans (far less, in some cases—my "oh no, this is gonna be really bad for the health of our democracy" moment was when he made his "2nd amendment people" remark and suffered no meaningful consequences, back in the '16 campaign) but there were a handful of cases like that, where the negative media response was sharply at odds with our (as, again, solid D voters who AFAIK all voted against him twice) reactions to things he did.