Simply unlocking a new round of trade talks with China was suppose to be a major victory, right? It's reason why Trump delayed his decision to impose tariffs on $300 billion in Chinese goods.
Those talks were suppose to resume this week, but that hasn't actually happened yet and, according to the Wall Street Journal, it's because Trump blames China for not following through on his own fake promises.
Trump's top trade adviser Peter Navarro says that's not the case, however, and he asserts that we've simply entered a "quiet period." He also called the Wall Street Journal's reporting "garbage" during an appearance on CNBC this morning.
“There’s just going to be a lot of garbage coming out of the Wall Street Journal and the People’s Daily and everything in between,” Navarro said. “I’ve seen this movie before... There were all sorts of stories written and they were designed to shape the negotiations and they didn’t have any insight into them,” Navarro said.
Navarro didn’t discuss any specific stories or present any evidence to back up his point. The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that certain issues were weighing on new trade talks, including China not stepping up purchases of American agricultural products. Trump himself later confirmed that lack of the purchases were a hang up.
“We stand by our reporting,” Colleen Schwartz, a spokeswoman at The Wall Street Journal told CNBC in response to Navarro’s comment.
China never promised -- not even one single time -- to immediately resume large-scale purchases of American agricultural products.
That promise was Trump's alone and, for various reasons we've already discussed here, it was never going to happen. Chinese importers are not buying American farm goods because of China's retaliatory tariffs on farm goods and there's no deal in place to lift tariffs on either side.
Reuters reports that Trump's trade representative Robert Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin will travel to China at some point the near future to begin a new round of talks, but I imagine Chinese officials are already rolling their eyes. These are the same two bozos they've been dealing with all along. The Chinese know just as well as we do that talking to Trump's underlings is a waste of time because Trump himself is the center of the obstacle course.
Navarro's allegation that the People's Daily is trying to "shape the negotiations" illustrates his ignorance because the People's Daily is a state-controlled media outlet that literally shapes the negotiations. Columns and reports that appear in the People's Daily are approved by the ruling party and nothing is published there that they don't agree with. Chinese officials have used the People's Daily and other state-controlled media outlets to indirectly speak to the Trump regime on many occasions in recent months.
If someone writes a column in the People's Daily that essentially says the Trumps are full of shit, that should be taken as the ruling communist party saying they're full of shit.