The Cost: Trump, China, and American Revival

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For Vickie and Jono

Introduction

At Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, it takes a while to make the chocolate cake. In pursuit of flourless chocolate sponge perfection, the pastry chef must first bring egg whites and sugar to medium-peak meringue before slowly adding the egg yolks. The Guayaquil mousse and vanilla punch also demand painstaking attention before they are combined with the chocolate sponge to yield the president’s favorite dessert.¹

And no rendering of this sumptuous sweet was more important than the one plated on the evening of April 6, 2017. One slice in particular carried special importance, as it was carried through the grand dining room at the Florida luxury resort. That’s because it gently landed in front of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping. Had he ever tasted anything like it in Beijing?

I was sitting at the table. We had finished dinner. We’re now having dessert and we had the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen. And President Xi was enjoying it, President Trump told Maria a few days later.²

Almost anyone would enjoy it, and the Chinese strongman certainly seemed to be enjoying his first visit to the United States since the inauguration of America’s new president. But Xi didn’t realize that while they were getting acquainted, his American host was planning to respond to a chemical attack by the Syrian government on its own citizens.

President Trump recalls that, during that cordial dinner with his Chinese guest at Mar-a-Lago, I was given the message from the generals that the ships are locked and loaded. What do you do? And we made a determination to do it. So the missiles were on the way. And I said, ‘Mr. President, let me explain something to you.’ Trump then informed Xi that fifty-nine missiles were in the air and headed for Syria.

Xi paused for ten seconds and then he asked the interpreter to please say it again. I didn’t think that was a good sign, says Trump. Given Beijing’s friendly relations with the Syrian regime, China’s top communist might have been expected to condemn the U.S. action. But then Xi said through the interpreter that it was acceptable to attack anybody who would use poison gas against children.

Xi had planned a carefully crafted meeting of equals. Instead he was upstaged by a firepower demonstration, observes Australia’s former ambassador to China, Geoff Raby.³

All fifty-nine U.S. missiles hit their intended targets. America’s new president had sent the world a message that he wasn’t afraid to exercise U.S. military force. The same message was delivered personally to the head of China’s Communist Party, but bundled with the additional note that Trump wanted to build a working relationship. Mr. Trump recalls that, after a productive day of meetings at Mar-a-Lago, he didn’t want Xi to return home and be told, You know, the guy you just had dinner with just attacked a country.

President Trump clearly understood the competitor he faced on the other side of the table. This would be the first of many negotiating dances the new American president would have with China’s dictator. Trump had been elected on a promise to make America great again, and a key part of his plan for U.S. economic revival was to change the trade relationship with China. Even if it went unmentioned over chocolate cake on that balmy night in Florida, Xi had plans of his own to make China the greatest of the world’s superpowers.

These days the mention of Xi Jinping doesn’t inspire thoughts of delicious cake but of a deadly virus which has ravaged the world. Its precise origins are still debated and many can’t help but wonder what exactly Xi’s government was cooking up inside its Wuhan virology lab in China’s Hubei province in 2019. Wuhan’s Huanan wet market, with its live exotic animals, was linked to early cases of the novel coronavirus and its deadly Covid-19 disease. But U.S. senator Tom Cotton of the Armed Services Committee says it’s important to keep investigating. The virus went into that food market before it came out of that food market. So we don’t know where it originated. But we do know that we have to get to the bottom of that. We also know that just a few miles away from that food market is China’s only biosafety-level-four super-laboratory that researches human infectious diseases, says the Arkansas Republican.⁴

Those inclined to believe in coincidences must also reckon with the fact that Xi’s regime hid the truth about the virus from its own people and the world for critical weeks, costing thousands of lives. The communist cover-up included the case of Dr. Li Wenliang, who had warned others of the new health threat before he was taken in by police, interrogated for spreading rumors, and forced to sign a document criticizing himself. Several weeks later the thirty-three-year-old ophthalmologist was dead from the coronavirus, leaving behind a young child and a pregnant wife.⁵

Almost three years before the world learned about one of China’s deadliest exports—and the deception surrounding it—Trump wanted to clarify that the United States had a new agenda and a new kind of leadership. The man sitting across the table from Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago and serving dessert was also making a display of American power that put the Chinese dictator on notice. Trump’s recounting of the meeting then offered the entire world an early window into this unconventional presidency.

The United States may never have another president as loved and hated as Donald Trump. And it’s hard to imagine one being subjected to so many investigations. The Dos Equis beer ads had it wrong: America’s forty-fifth president is the most interesting man in the world. And his administration deserves a fair accounting, not unqualified condemnation or praise. We intend to make the case that Donald Trump is an underrated chief executive—and that the abuse of federal investigative power against him is the greatest scandal of his era.

We also intend to explain how a White House that appears so chaotic and has been so fiercely resisted by the nation’s press and political establishment has managed to enact so much of the agenda promised to voters in 2016. Reporters like to present Trump as a catastrophe for the country, but it’s time to also consider the cost of not having him as president. Difficult as it may be for many media observers to comprehend—and regardless of the results of the 2020 election—Trump has achieved a successful presidency hidden in plain sight.

It’s perhaps all the more surprising given that he came to the job with no experience in elective office. The real estate developer from Queens rode down an escalator in one of his eponymous Manhattan skyscrapers to announce his campaign for president on June 16, 2015. After arriving at the bottom, he unleashed a raw tirade that resonated with blue-collar voters even as it repelled the nation’s political and media establishment.

Just before Trump arrived at the podium, his daughter Ivanka promised the enthusiastic gathering that her father would outwork anyone in any room and that he was the opposite of politically correct. Nearly four years into the Trump presidency, it’s hard to argue with either claim, especially considering the people who tend to populate Washington meeting rooms. Ms. Trump also lauded her father’s refusal to take no for an answer in negotiations and said that he has the discernment to understand what the other party needs and then to get exactly what he wants. She added that he’s a dreamer but also a doer.

At the conclusion of her remarks, speakers in the Trump Tower lobby blared Neil Young’s Rockin’ in the Free World, which fired up the crowd and has been annoying Young ever since. Donald Trump then ascended the stage, and after thanking people and commenting on the size of the crowd, said:

Our country is in serious trouble. We don’t have victories anymore. We used to have victories, but we don’t have them. When was the last time anybody saw us beating, let’s say, China in a trade deal? They kill us. I beat China all the time. All the time.

Not exactly the Gettysburg Address, but he did get right to the point. The new candidate then made a boast that must have seemed preposterous to reporters covering the event: I will be the greatest jobs president that God ever created.

Two years and seven months later, U.S. job openings hit a record high of 6.3 million. The record would be broken several times in the Trump era. Also remarkable was that, for the first time since the government began tracking such data, there were just as many job openings as unemployed Americans.⁶

Newspaper fact-checkers are free to opine on whether they think God created Trump, but they can hardly argue with the numbers.

Back in 2015 at Trump Tower, amused reporters may have failed to appreciate, that while Trump had never held political office, he was the most skilled communicator in the presidential race. We’re not just talking about his ability to make his case in fewer than 280 characters. Maria went to Trump Tower in 2016 to conduct a television interview with the rookie Republican candidate and former host of NBC’s The Apprentice. Before any discussion of economic plans or foreign policy priorities, Trump insisted on rearranging the television lights so that the brightest coverage was on the interview subject rather than the interviewer. Well played. He knew that, for any journalist, getting an exclusive with the country’s new preeminent newsmaker would take priority over aesthetics. The meticulous rearrangement of the lighting has continued to be a pre-interview Trump ritual during his presidency.

Trump brought the same attention to detail to the crafting of his campaign message, which was almost entirely focused on winning over swing districts in Middle America with a promise of economic revival. He argued that step one was defeating an entrenched media and political elite.

Upon accepting the 2016 Republican nomination in Cleveland in July, Trump said: America is a nation of believers, dreamers, and strivers that is being led by a group of censors, critics, and cynics. Remember: all of the people telling you that you can’t have the country you want are the same people telling you that I wouldn’t be standing here tonight.

He promised that Republicans would lead our country back to safety, prosperity, and peace and then described an economy in disrepair:

I will tell you the plain facts that have been edited out of your nightly news and your morning newspaper:

Nearly four in 10 African-American children are living in poverty, while 58 percent of African-American youth are not employed.

Two million more Latinos are in poverty today than when President Obama took his oath of office less than eight years ago.

Another 14 million people have left the workforce entirely. Household incomes are down more than $4,000 since the year 2000—16 years ago.

He then proposed reforms to add millions of new jobs and trillions in new wealth…⁷

What’s perhaps most striking today is that the agenda he promised in Cleveland is precisely the one he has been pursuing ever since. On that summer night in Ohio four years ago he said, We are going to enforce all trade violations against any country that cheats. This includes stopping China’s outrageous theft of intellectual property. Then he elaborated on the heart of his economic program:

We are going to start building and making things again.

Next comes the reform of our tax laws, regulations, and energy rules. While Hillary Clinton plans a massive tax increase, I have proposed the largest tax reduction of any candidate who has run for president this year, Democrat or Republican.…

… Reducing taxes will cause new companies and new jobs to come roaring back into our country. Then we are going to deal with the issue of regulation, one of the greatest job-killers of them all. Excessive regulation is costing our country as much as $2 trillion a year, and we will end it. We are going to lift the restrictions on the production of American energy.…

It was a promise of a better life for the people I have met all across this nation that have been ignored, neglected, and abandoned. He described the forgotten men and women of our country. People who work hard but no longer have a voice. He promised to be the voice for industrial workers whose industries had been closing U.S. plants, especially in the Midwest.⁸

And throughout the campaign this message was remarkably consistent. At times during his debates with Hillary Clinton, he sounded like he was running for governor of Michigan. One of the great ironies of 2016 is that the first-timer understood the rules of the game better than the political pros. Unlike most candidates, Trump ran a campaign premised on the fact that the Electoral College really does decide U.S. presidential elections.

Meanwhile the rugged and rude Trump style inspired—or at least provided an excuse for—opponents in politics and the press to discard the normal rules for objectivity, fairness, and governmental restraint. The campaign to impeach him began almost the moment he won the election in November of 2016. On his first full day in office in 2017, hundreds of thousands gathered in Washington to protest his presidency—an event organized well before his presidency had even begun.

Trump’s critics styled themselves the Resistance, as if they were confronting a tyrant at the head of an invading army rather than their duly elected president. Most disturbing was the resistance movement inside the federal government, which in 2016 included at least one FBI attorney falsifying an email and duping the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court into approving a wiretap on a Trump campaign volunteer. Reports from the Obama-appointed inspector general of the Justice Department and others revealed that a cabal at the FBI repeatedly misled the court in its effort to investigate Team Trump and failed to disclose that the bogus Steele dossier of accusations against Trump was paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign or that the government already had reasons to doubt it that were never shared in warrant applications.

In December 2019 the court found that FBI personnel had provided information to the court which was unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession. The court ordered the FBI in a sworn written submission to explain what it was doing to prevent such abuses.⁹

In 2020 the Justice Department acknowledged that at least two of its approved warrants were invalid. In March of 2020 the court effectively banned FBI agents involved in the Trump campaign wiretap abuses from appearing before it on any other matters.¹⁰

The FBI’s surveillance of Trump associates is perhaps the worst abuse of federal power in recent history. But fortunately a more encouraging trend was also happening in America at the dawn of the Trump era. A surge of optimism among business owners was translating into plans for new investment that would eventually lead to that record-setting job market. This surge of optimism caught much of the media by surprise—but not the coauthors of this book. While many journalists were reeling from the shock of Trump’s victory in November of 2016 and predicting economic doom, Maria told television viewers that she’d be buying the stock market with both hands.¹¹

Investors who acted on that sentiment enjoyed significant gains.

Trump’s trade policy was an unknown, but a president promising significant tax and regulatory relief was sparking broad enthusiasm among business owners from Wall Street to Main Street. By the time Trump took office on January 20, 2017, that enthusiasm was translating into expanding opportunity for American workers.

The National Federation of Independent Business’s chief economist, William C. Dunkelberg, reported that the month Donald Trump took office a rise in the percentage of small business owners planning to create jobs added up to the strongest reading since November 2006. And, unlike 2006, this burst of hiring wasn’t occurring during a housing bubble. Trump’s arrival at the White House brought still more good news for workers. Reports of increased worker compensation in the NFIB survey hit a ten-year high.¹²

The good news on U.S. employment would continue for the first three years of the Trump presidency as the promise of a lighter burden on American business was fulfilled. This unconventional political approach of Trump meaning what he said on the campaign trail has marked him as a Beltway oddity even more than his colorful Twitter commentary. And perhaps that is one reason why much of the Washington establishment still cannot forgive him. His presence upended their power structure.

Many of our media brethren have proven unable or unwilling to report on Donald Trump objectively, and a few have even explicitly made the case that he doesn’t deserve traditional journalistic standards of fairness. Media criticism of President Trump has been so constant and so intense that most Americans probably don’t even remember the moment in 2017 when CNN declared that the restoration of an FCC policy that had been in place for decades meant the end of the Internet as we know it.¹³

Also largely forgotten are the warnings of economic and societal catastrophe as a result of his tax cuts.

In the second month of the Trump presidency, a news report in the New York Times essentially predicted that the highest elected official in the United States would ultimately lose a power struggle with Washington’s unelected establishment. Times reporters faulted Mr. Trump for believing he can master an entrenched political press corps with far deeper connections to the permanent government of federal law enforcement and executive department officials than he has. The Times report added that the president is being force-fed lessons all presidents eventually learn—that the iron triangle of the Washington press corps, West Wing staff, and federal bureaucracy is simply too powerful to bully.¹⁴

Of course Donald Trump was elected precisely because many voters were searching for someone to protect them from Washington’s bureaucratic bullies.

In that mission he has largely succeeded, although it hasn’t always been pretty. Most politicians go to great lengths to conceal character flaws. Donald Trump wears them on his sleeve. Most presidents try to appear dignified and restrained in response to criticism. When a former cabinet secretary questioned the president’s competence, Trump called him dumb as a rock.

Speaking of former administration officials, Trump is setting records for acrimonious partings with senior staff. And America’s forty-fifth president is often no more diplomatic in the way he conducts foreign relations. He called the leader of one of America’s closest allies very dishonest and weak¹⁵

—but also managed to strike a new trade deal with him.

Trump’s impolite and unconventional style partly explains how he could manage to get impeached without being accused of any crime in either of the two impeachment articles passed in the U.S. House. And even people who find the Biden family’s mining of overseas wealth appalling may not like the president’s handling of relations with Ukraine.

But Trump’s odd manners and methods also obscure the substance of a highly consequential presidency with significant achievements. Much of the press corps may now be dedicated to cataloging the inaccuracies in the president’s rhetoric. Yet it’s hard to name an elected official who has more faithfully pursued his campaign agenda—or has disclosed more of his thoughts and opinions. And his well-documented faults appear smaller the more we learn about the surveillance abuses conducted by his detractors within the federal government beginning in 2016. If such abuses of power can target even a successful presidential campaign and White House through wiretaps, informants, and a media leak strategy, then there is little hope of fairness for the rest of us.

Three years into his term, Donald Trump is neither the dignified statesman that some Americans hoped he might become nor the abusive authoritarian that media critics claimed he would be. But Trump can—and often does—boast of impressive results when it comes to the central promise of his 2016 campaign: restoring economic opportunity for the average worker. As we’ll describe, in the years before Covid the U.S. job market set a series of records.

Trump has accused many members of the media—including Maria and the Journal editorial page where James serves as assistant editor—of spreading fake news. Yet media organizations are thriving in the Trump era. The question is no longer whether they will remain free to criticize him but how they will continue to generate such robust ratings and revenues after he leaves the Oval Office.

Now it’s time for Americans to review the record and