Trump 1.0 is surely entitled to some credit for emphasizing the impacts of the massive Chinese trade surplus on the rest of the world. The surplus is due less to “communism” than to Xi’s preference for producers over consumers and his desire to stifle opposition to China by making the rest of the world dependent on its products. Logically, Trump 2.0 would have responded to the surplus by persuading American consumers to accept a regime of short-term austerity and by uniting the rest of the world against unfair Chinese trade practices. He did neither; he backed down in the face of Chinese retaliation and market unrest and decided to bully the rest of the world for no obviously good reason.
So what’s the new plan, Stan? Trump is putting all of his eggs into the AI basket in the hope that it will restore American economic supremacy. Exactly how the benefits of AI can be confined to American producers and how the negative impacts of Frankenstein’s monster can be kept under control appear to be of no concern to him.