After questioning whether the Fed Chairman is a bigger enemy than Chairman Xi of China, Trump ripped into China and ordered American companies to leave communist country:
Our Country has lost, stupidly, Trillions of Dollars with China over many years. They have stolen our Intellectual Property at a rate of Hundreds of Billions of Dollars a year, & they want to continue. I won’t let that happen! We don’t need China and, frankly, would be far….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2019
….better off without them. The vast amounts of money made and stolen by China from the United States, year after year, for decades, will and must STOP. Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2019
….your companies HOME and making your products in the USA. I will be responding to China’s Tariffs this afternoon. This is a GREAT opportunity for the United States. Also, I am ordering all carriers, including Fed Ex, Amazon, UPS and the Post Office, to SEARCH FOR & REFUSE,….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2019
….all deliveries of Fentanyl from China (or anywhere else!). Fentanyl kills 100,000 Americans a year. President Xi said this would stop – it didn’t. Our Economy, because of our gains in the last 2 1/2 years, is MUCH larger than that of China. We will keep it that way!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2019
Ok first of all, we know Trump can’t just go ordering private companies around. That’s not how our constitutional republic works. But he can bully those who refuse his ‘order’ by making them subject to new tariffs in his trade war. And with Trump’s trade-war history of pushing high tariffs on even our allies, this is surely an ‘order’ that companies must take seriously. It would be a terrible precedent if he began singling out companies and punishing them this way. It certainly wouldn’t be very American and I would hope that should this actually happen, Congress would take matters into their own hands and restrict Trump’s ability to do this.
Now I’m not saying he will do this, but the threat is implicit in the ‘ordering’ of companies to leave China. If Obama were to have said this, we’d be all over him for it and rightly so. I know Trump likes to ‘vent’ on Twitter, but he needs to tread carefully before he ends up with an election-level incident that could significantly diminish his hopes of winning next year.
As a result of these tweets by Trump, the stock market has fallen almost 500 points. Seems they aren’t to keen on all this either.