Even the NYT had to admit that Trump is ‘on solid ground when accuses China’ of nefarious trade practices, even though that newspaper continues to say that he is going about it the wrong way. Let’s try to translate this. Trump has made the correct diagnosis but is administering the wrong cure. Maybe they have a point, in saying for example that his solutions are half baked.
But perhaps the more interesting question that is not asked, is why did it take so long to realise that the US has been trade-abused for decades, and why has no other more literate, polite, erudite president been able to articulate the problem, and propose a ‘fully baked’ solution?
Why hasn’t that darling of the liberals, Mr. Obama, done anything about it? Maybe if he did, he would have done much more elegantly? But the truth is that nobody else has. In the same way, previous presidents have chosen to kick the can down the road with the North Korean problem, the Jerusalem capital issue, and most important of all, this president is not going to let the bad deal that his predecessor held up as his chef d’oeuvre, turn Iran into a nuclear nation…just not now, in a few years.
Trump may not be articulate, elegant, loyal, or politically correct, but he seems to be able to identify big wrongs and start to do something about it.