This video is free, but with Premium Membership you get MORE. Join today.
by Rod D. Martin and Charles Payne
May 6, 2025
Donald Trump is in the process of not just decoupling the U.S. economy from China, but isolating it and drying up the funding for its war machine.
I discussed this yesterday on “Making Money with Charles Payne”. You can see the interview above. Here’s the rest of what you need to know.
Trump has made clear: he has no problem with “zero-zero tariffs” such as those proposed by Argentina’s Javier Milei. He has a huge problem with lopsided deals that prevent American business from competing fairly in countries that have free access to our world’s-largest consumer market. Fair’s fair. So his goal is not the tariffs themselves, but the fear of them, leading to better deals and real, not fake, free trade.
This is Reagan’s “Zero Option” all over again. Reagan deployed a large number of new nuclear weapons to Europe to counter the Soviets’ similar deployment, while proposing that all such weapons be banned. Everyone laughed, until in 1987 he achieved exactly that.
But speaking of Reagan, the 20th Century’s greatest President also used market power — specifically a huge arms race coupled with collapsing the price of energy, from which Russia derived the cash it needed to compete — to bankrupt the Soviet Union.
Trump learned the lesson. Now China is learning it.
Checkmating China is Trump’s foremost national security goal. China is a bad actor, closing its markets in countless ways, stealing U.S. intellectual property with abandon, and using the very different economics of Communism to drive Western businesses under. But it’s also a real military threat, one that vocally threatens nuclear and biological warfare a little too often. It’s building a real military. It needs money for that, just as the Soviets did.
And China walked right into Trump’s trap.
Trump’s lieutenants had made clear to every trading partner: don’t retaliate and things will turn out well. But Xi Jinping has built an entire foreign policy on being the leader who’ll stand up to Trump. When the President announced his tariffs, Xi doubled down.
Big mistake.
Trump responded to China’s retaliation by slapping them with a 145% tariff, while giving everyone else a 90-day pause. The result? China stands alone — and completely exposed. When Trump comes back, he’ll have formed a new trade bloc that opposes China together. But even if he can’t quite swing that, he’ll have decoupled the American and Chinese economies, at a time when exports are the only thing keeping China afloat.
A lot of pundits are completely befuddled by the idea that Trump might be doing more than one thing at once. Add to that their certainty that everything he says is serious, and everything he does must necessarily be stupid, and their conclusions are nearly always wrong.
I’ve told you that the President has a few one-off aims beyond his primary goal, aims like isolating and defeating China, and stemming the illegal tide of fentanyl across the Canadian and Mexican borders. In January he threatened massive tariffs against both countries unless they stepped up border security. They complied, and the tariffs went away.
But don’t make the mistake the pundit class is making and confuse these two threads. They both flow logically from the same presupposition — “they need us more than we need them” — but their aims are not the same. Indeed, the latter serves as noise to obscure the former.
This is key to Trump’s entire strategy: noise. Constant confusion. Fear of possible consequences. Seemingly rash action. Risk.
He told you all of this in The Art of the Deal. Am I the only person who actually read the book?
This could not be more different than Washington’s meticulously calculated, hyper-accurate, risk-averse approach of the Cold War and post-Cold War eras. That’s a lot of why the establishment hates him. He doesn’t fit in their neat little box.
Trump is smashing the box. The emerging order is going to be better, freer, safer, richer. And a heck of a lot more honest.
You’re watching the creation in real time.
— The video at the top appeared yesterday afternoon on Fox Business’s “Making Money with Charles Payne”.
Our Premium Members get more depth, more data, and earlier access. Join today.
Share this post