Foreign Policy > China

Trump Cracks China’s Fortune Cookie

MAGA is bringing the fight to the CCP.

J.B. Shurk | March 6, 2026

It’s easy to forget that ten years ago, candidate Donald Trump was the only national politician who took China’s growing geopolitical power seriously.  He talked about China so frequently and pronounced those two syllables so deliberately — Chi-na — that comedians and voters alike enjoyed doing imitations of the MAGA-man taking America’s geopolitical adversary to task.

On the stump, Trump called both Republicans and Democrats “stupid” for how they had permitted the Chinese Communist Party to devour American assets.  He would list beautiful American buildings and historic American real estate that the Chinese had acquired since President Bill Clinton and both parties in Congress decided to ignore China’s past bad behavior (including the ’89 massacre of pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square) and welcome it into the world’s premier economic clubs.  He pointed to two decades of multinational trade “deals” that had resulted in the closures of industrial and manufacturing plants across the United States, as once-American companies shifted operations to China and took advantage of the communists’ disregard for workers’ safety or subsistence wages.  He argued that China’s currency manipulation, organized theft of American trade secrets, and sidestepping of environmental and human rights treaties ensured that American wealth flowed in one direction: directly into the pockets of the CCP.  

Trump couldn’t believe that American politicians could be so reckless, or worse, consciously willing to sabotage American economic interests for a traitor’s paycheck from Chinese-run lobbyists.  He excoriated national companies for betraying Americans while profiting from slave labor on the other side of the world.  His campaign for president was simultaneously a campaign against this percolating notion in the West that the twenty-first century belonged to China.

Remember how common it was a decade ago to hear pundits proclaim with........

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