Do Trump books’ brash words about ‘enemy’ China presage a tougher approach to Beijing? We’re about to find out
Some of the dozen books Trump has co-written in the past 30 years contain tough talk about China, particularly one issued to buttress a 2012 election run that never happened
“I’ve read hundreds of books about China over the decades. I know the Chinese. I’ve made a lot of money with the Chinese. I understand the Chinese mind,” Donald Trump wrote in his 1987 book The Art of the Deal.
China is our enemy. It’s time we started acting like it
Asked more recently by China news agency Xinhua which were his favourite China books, he was reportedly able to list 20, ranging from Jung Chang’s Mao: The Untold Story and Henry Kissinger’s On China to Gavin Menzies’ 1421: The Year China Discovered The World and even Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.
Whether these were Trump’s own choices or a list quickly contrived by his spin doctors we will never know.
They provide more than a hint as to where stands the man who betrays an admiration for Attila the Hun in 2001’s Midas Touch: Why Some Entrepreneurs Get Rich - and Why Most Don’t (“One of the greatest brand builders of all times was Attila the Hun. His brand preceded him so powerfully that opposing armies often surrendered before fighting him,” he writes).
Perhaps the most significant insight is to be found in revisiting 2011’s Time to Get Tough: Making America Great Again, intended to buttress a Trump presidential campaign in 2012 (the book was, tellingly, updated and reissued in 2015 as Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again).