President Donald Trump is on solid ground when he accuses China of stealing American technology and pressuring foreign companies to hand over intellectual property to Chinese firms as a condition of doing business there. But he does not seem to know how to fix that pressing problem.
Trump on Thursday announced a three-pronged attack on China. He said he would bring a case against the country at the World Trade Organization, slap about $60 billion of tariffs on unspecified imports from China and impose restrictions on what investments Chinese businesses can make in the United States. His administration argues that these decisions are meant to force President Xi Jinping of China to begin to play by the rules other major economies follow — a goal that eluded President Barack Obama and his predecessors. But it is hard to see how Trump will do much better. That’s because this president has shown little interest in putting together the kind of effective strategy that would be needed to get China to change its ways.
The first element of the administration’s approach — going to the trade organization to challenge China’s use of technology-licensing policies to transfer know-how from foreign businesses to Chinese companies — is a good start. It also bucks the president’s oft-stated disdain for the trade organization and multilateral institutions in general. But Trump could have gone much further. He ought to have enlisted Canada, the European Union, Japan, South Korea and other countries to jointly put pressure on China. Technology businesses in these countries have many of the same complaints about China that American businesses do. By assembling a coalition to confront China, Trump would have left it little room to maneuver. But by acting alone, he has given Xi the ability to make common cause with other countries that see Trump as a bully intent on penalizing rivals and allies alike.
The second part of his plan — a 25 percent tariff on certain Chinese products, which the administration says it will specify in the coming days — could cause collateral damage to domestic industry and farmers. The Chinese government is already threatening to retaliate by imposing restrictions on American soybeans, sorghum and other farm commodities in a targeted assault on states that voted for Trump. The country might also seek to switch from American products to European, Canadian or Japanese equivalents. Tariffs are blunt tools that are far less effective than Trump realizes. Stocks fell sharply Thursday after Trump’s tariff announcement, with the S&P 500 closing down 2.5 percent for the day.
The last prong of his announcement calls on officials to propose restrictions on China’s acquisition of critical American technologies. This is the weakest of the three steps he is taking, because his administration already has the authority to block foreign acquisitions of American businesses.
Trump prides himself on being tough, especially on foreigners who he argues have been taking advantage of the United States. But in practice, he has displayed great weakness in dealing with other countries by fawning over autocrats like Xi and President Vladimir Putin of Russia. He has also reversed and contradicted himself so frequently that it can be impossible for not just adversaries, but even his own staff, to know what he stands for and what he is trying to achieve. Further, his wishy-washiness allows leaders of other nations to cut favorable deals with him that undermine the very policies he says he is trying to advance.
For example, on Thursday the administration said it would exempt the European Union, Brazil, Argentina, South Korea and Australia from tariffs on steel and aluminum imports he signed this month. That is in addition to exemptions the president previously granted to Canada and Mexico. Experts say this means that more than half the metal the United States imports will now be free from those tariffs, calling into question the point of these tariffs aside from misleading American companies and workers into thinking that the president was doing something for them. Might Trump cut a similarly bizarre deal with Xi the next time the two leaders meet at Mar-a-Lago? It’s anybody’s guess.
On the day last June that President Donald Trump hired John Dowd, a high-powered and aggressive defense lawyer, to take charge of his personal legal team, Dowd received a warm welcome. “When John Dowd speaks, everybody listens,” a spokesman for the team said.
Well, not everybody. Dowd resigned abruptly Thursday, after concluding that Trump was increasingly ignoring his advice.
Advice like, do not under any circumstances sit for an interview with the special counsel, Robert Mueller, who is investigating possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russian government officials, as well as whether Trump obstructed justice by, among other things, firing the FBI director, James Comey, who was previously running the investigation.
Dowd, like any reasonably sentient person, knows there is no way that a conversation with Mueller would go well for the president. Trump doesn’t have a relationship to the truth, but may at one point have had a fleeting affair with it, albeit one apparently covered by a nondisclosure agreement. He lies with pleasure and abandon, then brags about it later. Yet on Thursday, Trump, who has built his career on the belief that he can brazen his way through anything, told reporters that he “would like to” testify.
At least when Dowd climbs into bed tonight, he can rest easy, knowing that he did all he possibly could for an impossible client. His last significant public comment as Trump’s lawyer was to call on the Justice Department to shut down the Russia investigation — a position he attributed to Trump before backtracking and claiming it as his own.
The president’s legal team appears to be falling apart just as his legal problems are mounting, both from the Russia investigation and, more recently, from women who say they’ve had affairs with Trump and are seeking to be released from agreements to silence them. Before Dowd’s departure, Trump had spoken to associates about firing Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer who has been advocating a cooperative approach toward Mueller. Meanwhile Trump has reached out to, and been rebuffed by, at least two legal heavyweights in the last few weeks: Emmet Flood, who represented President Bill Clinton during his impeachment process, and the conservative superstar Ted Olson.
In their stead the president has brought on Joseph diGenova, a lawyer who has argued on television that the Justice Department and the FBI are framing Trump. Who else is there? Alan Dershowitz, the celebrity defense lawyer and self-described liberal from Harvard who has taken on the unlikely role of Trump defender? Or Marc Kasowitz, who previously represented Trump before leaving because he, among other things, threatened a stranger over email?
The bigger problem for Trump is that there aren’t many experienced lawyers who will want to take on a client like him — save, perhaps, Michael Cohen, a longtime loyalist and Trump lawyer who may be in serious legal trouble of his own, and Roy Cohn, who is dead. Cohn, a litigious thug who helped destroy the lives of many decent people before being disbarred for “particularly reprehensible” ethical violations, took a young Trump under his wing and taught him how to use the law: as a concealed weapon, brandished primarily in the service of vengeance or survival. Trump was an avid student, as evidenced by the empty threats of litigation he aims regularly at reporters or the unconscionable nondisclosure agreements he wrests from his paramours and underlings.
Beyond this, Trump has shown contempt for the rule of law and its operation in a democratic society. He attacks the institutions that embody it, from the Justice Department and the FBI to the federal courts and their judges. His approach is not based on any philosophy of governance, but on scorn for or fear of anyone who would hold him to account. So it is fitting that the biggest threat to Trump is coming from the courts, and from Mueller, who in many ways represents Trump’s polar opposite — a man who has devoted his life to respecting and enforcing the law. And it’s concerning, to say the least, that Trump is eagerly throwing off the yoke of relatively sober legal counsel just as Mueller homes in on the president and his shady family business empire.
John Dowd is the latest to flee Trump’s legal team, but he won’t be the last. As the saying goes, any lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client. Dowd may well have come to the same realization about those who represent this president.
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