Trump's Good Cop / Bad Cop Routine on China

The Administration is staffed with uber-hawks but Trump keeps everyone guessing

There was a fascinating exchange in today’s cabinet meeting / press conference which will be largely ignored, but I found incredibly telling. Here is it:

REPORTER: My question for Secretary Rollins. You did an amazing press conference today in front of the Department of Agriculture. You talked about the Farm Act and the need to get China out of our country owning farmland. For the viewers at home that might have missed that, can you recap what that means, national security, to make sure we grow our own food?

TRUMP: Well, thank you, Brian.

ROLLINS: Sir, if you don't mind.

TRUMP: Yes.

ROLLINS: This morning, Secretary Hegseth, Secretary Noem, and Attorney General Bondi and I had a press conference at the USDA. I just happened to have a chart in case it came up. But obviously the Chinese owning a farmland in our country is a massive national security issue. And for the media, you can see the yellow is where all of the farms have been purchased over the last number of years. And the red is around all of the military bases where that farmland has been purchased. So this is a massive national security issue. The press conference this morning included three of our greatest governors as well, Sarah Sanders from Arkansas. Jim Palin from Nebraska, and Bill Lee from Tennessee. The states have begun taking a leadership role to ban the purchasing of China farmland. Obviously, Congress needs to step up and catch up and we're going to be working alongside of them as well. We had some of our members, two great members of Congress there, but it is time.

And I think that this morning was symbolic of many things. The first of this administration working every day to effectuate President Trump's leadership and unequivocal support of America first. But second, just how close we are as a cabinet. I don't know in any other administration that you'd have four cabinet members at the USDA on a Tuesday morning when it's about 110 degrees outside with the sun beating down on us, talking about, sir, your vision. So I think it was a great day. It was just the start. There's an executive order coming and some other things coming behind that. But protecting America's farms isn't just about protecting our farmers. It's also about national security. So that's what we discussed this morning.

TRUMP: I do want to say that I think we have had a really good relationship with China lately. And we're getting along with them very well. They've been very fair on our trade deal. Honestly, and I hope we're going to have a great relationship - a big, strong, powerful country. We're more powerful than they are. We have much better military equipment than they do, but we are getting along with them very well. I'm getting along with President Xi very well. We speak often and with all of that being said and I understand what you're saying, but I think we're getting along with China very well.

Got that? We have a very good relationship with China. It’s just that if a Chinese national buys a US farm within 100 miles of a military installtation, we assume they’re spying.

While China owns only a tiny fraction of US farmland (largely related to the fact that Smithfield Foods is owned by a Chinese conglomerate), China has done so little to earn the world's trust that policies like these are understandable. But it’s only the kind of policy one would enact against a perceived enemy.

Yet President Trump insists on maintaining the facade of a great national friendship, trying to keep the the water temperature simmering at just below the point at which the frog will jump out of the pot. Becuase once the frog jumps, it’s going to wreak havoc in one dimension or another - be it economic, financial, diplomatic or even kinetic.

The swiftness with which the President interjected today, as if to say “whoa, whoa, we love you China - don’t take this farm stuff personally,” belies a deep (and justified) concern for what China might do once the US policy of strategic decoupling takes visible root.

His “good cop” routine, played against a cabinet and staff that he has filled top to bottom with China hawks, also serves the purpose of strategic ambiguity.

As a long-time advocate of decoupling, it is not lost on me that the last real data point we have from Donald Trump on this was the 2019 rug-pull of the China hawks known as the “Phase One Trade Deal,” a faux deal that contained not even a pretense that China might change its underlying behavior.

So we don’t really know where the President really stands on this, do we? It’s possible that, as he often tells us, he genuinely hopes for a Communist authoritarian China to “do well” economically (as long as they continue to play second fiddle geopolitically). As long as he can maintiain that pretense, he retains control of the game board, with Xi Jinping in a reactive posture.

While we can’t know what’s in the President’s head or heart, we can see that he’s staffed his administration - in virtually all key positions across Defense, State and the economic team - with strong China hawks, many of whom don’t want a CCP-run China to do well, because they’d rather see China run by an entity more representative of the Chinese citizenry than the CCP.

But if President Trump is aligned with these super-hawks (as I suspect he is), he is intent on keeping that fact to himself, and for good reason.

I don’t know how long President Trumo can keep the frog in the pot (and I doubt it’ll sit through the EU signing a trade deal with a ‘strategic decoupling” component). But he sure jumped up to turn the heat down today.