During the 2016 campaign, Mr Trump pledged to get much tougher on trade with China, which he accused of “raping” the US. After launching a trade war with Beijing, he secured a limited trade deal in January. But that agreement looks wobbly and the trade deficit remains stubbornly high.
The US trade deficit in goods with China in 2016 was $347bn. For 2019, it was only marginally lower at $345bn.
Ryan Hass, a China expert at the Brookings Institution and an informal adviser to Joe Biden’s campaign, said that, during the 2016 campaign, Mr Trump pledged to negotiate better trade deals for US workers and asked voters to use the size of the deficit as a “scorecard”.
“The reason he doesn’t want to talk about trade [now] is he doesn’t want the media to do the forensics,” Mr Hass added. “Americans got their shit kicked out of them in the exact area where President Trump said he would solve their problems.”
I suspect that with the economy in the collapsed state it is, this -$2B (<0.6%) difference may represent an actual increase in real trade dollars. But what do I know?
2019 though. If the metric was supposed to be trade deficit with China, he failed. They give the trump spokesman spin in the article, but they’re not buying it.
The Trump Files: Donald Accuses a Whiskey Company of Election Fraud
btw: I hate sites with chaotic article titles, where the HTML title is different from the headline in the text, which is different from the og:title, etc, with a multiplier for sites that change the article headline hourly.
Ever since Jane Mayer’s story on the chicken industry, focusing on Ronald Cameron, I’ve been looking for more news stories to flesh out my stub article on him and his activities.
Today’s Google fishing for Ronald Cameron Mountaire landed a surprise. Just four pages in, my own stub article! (I’ll check again, via another browser, to make sure that Google’s not biasing my results.)
This guy seems to have been working very hard to stay out of the news, but because of that, a stub article about him, on a Raspberry Pi with a dynamic IP address, can grab a fourth page slot position on Google.
If he wasn’t a chump, he’d have had people feeding fluffy nothing to the web to drown out low level stuff like mine.
eta: His “personal” site is five pages in on Google. (Oh wait, it’s an anti-Ron Cameron site from the Humane League. Hm, they need to work harder.)
(Oh wait, it’s an anti-Ron Cameron site from the Humane League. Hm, they need to work harder.)