Quora: How did Trump lose the trade war with China so badly?

David W. Rudlin answered:

He went it alone.

He overestimated his strengths and completely ignored his weaknesses.

He misunderstood how tariffs work.

He underestimated the willingness of the Chinese people to suffer rather than give in to bullying.

He shifted gears so often the Chinese concluded his word was meaningless.

He doesn’t understand long-term business relationships.

He does not understand that a trade deficit is not the same thing as a HUMILIATING LOSS TO PEOPLE WHO ARE LAUGHING AT US.

This last one is probably the most important. China makes a lot of stuff we want to buy, at prices we want to pay. This is not necessarily a bad thing. About 80% of the products on Walmart’s shelves come from China, and Walmart makes it possible for people with limited resources to get what they need at very low prices.

It would be easy to shrink the deficit by blocking or raising — through tariffs — the prices of Chinese goods. But American consumers would suffer as a result. They would end up with fewer items in their grocery cart, for the same money, just to shrink a number that ultimately isn’t that meaningful.

A smart president would have focused on increasing our sales of higher margin services to China. That requires understanding more complicated issues like market access, theft of intellectual property, etc. trump can’t be bothered with that much detail.

Moreover, his business career is based on a series of transactional relationships that usually end up in court. It’s why no US bank will lend him money, and how he ended up in a still mysterious relationship with Deutsche Bank.

Most businesses don’t work that way. Agribusiness certainly doesn’t. Our soybean, corn and alfalfa farmers spent the better part of a decade building trust-based relationships with Chinese buyers. trump destroyed all of that almost overnight. That gave farmers in Russia and Brazil a chance to step in and build relationships of their own. Even if the trade deals finally get sorted, American farmers will be on the outside looking in.

I could go on and on, but I’ll finish with this: tariffs don’t work if the country you’re attacking has alternate sources of supply. If trump had worked with Russia and Brazil on agriculture, or with the EU on IP protection, China would have had little choice but to alter their position. But trump sees himself as Superman, flying in to save the day all by himself. He can’t stand having to treat other leaders as equals. He doesn’t want to share credit, and he seems incapable of understanding that it may be blame that gets spread around at the end.

So he did it on his own, and he did it wrong. And American taxpayers just shelled out ANOTHER $15 billion so he can buy the votes of the farmers whose lives he destroyed.