Donald Trump announces 2024 bid for US presidency, vows to cut ‘dependence on China’

Third run for Oval Office will face opposition from own Republican Party after lacklustre midterm election results for candidates he backed
Former president who steered US into direct economic confrontation with China undeterred by impeachment and ongoing January 6 probe

US-China relations

Robert Delaney

Published: 1:05am, 17 Nov 2022

Why you can trust SCMP

Former US president Donald Trump, whose administration steered Washington into direct economic confrontation with Beijing, announced late on Tuesday that he will run for a second term in the White House.

Undeterred by an impeachment and an investigation by the US House of Representatives for his role in the January 6 riots on Capitol Hill last year and poor results for a slew of candidates that he backed in last week’s midterm elections, Trump declared his intention during a prime-time event at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

“We turned the page on decades of globalist sell-outs and one-sided trade deals … and built the greatest economy in the history of the world,” Trump told the crowd, referencing trade policies that he presided over, including the tariff war with Beijing that started in 2018.

“No president had ever saw [sic] or received one dollar for our country from China until I came along.”

However, the 45th US president’s signature effort to rebalance the bilateral economic relationship has yet to bear fruit despite a phase-one trade agreement with Beijing that committed China to buy an additional US$200 billion worth of American goods and services over the following two years.

According to a report released by the Peterson Institute for International Economics in February, China bought only 57 per cent of the US exports it had committed to purchase under the agreement, which was “not even enough to reach its import levels from before the trade war”.

Also, the US imported US$505 billion worth of goods from China in 2021, according to US government data, even with 2017, the last full year before the punitive tariffs took effect.

Trump’s remarks continued the false assertion that Chinese companies, instead of American buyers, pay the duties on the products they ship to the US.

The former president’s meandering speech also incorrectly asserted that Beijing’s “Made in China 2025” policy – an effort to eliminate dependency on advanced technologies like semiconductors – was the country’s plan to “take over virtually the whole world economy” by 2025.

He claimed his efforts in office prevented China from displacing the US as the largest economy of the world in 2018 or 2019. Estimates for China achieving that status vary widely, with most pegging the point somewhere around 2030 or later.

Trump summed up his approach to US-China relations with a pledge to “launch an all out campaign to eliminate America’s dependence on China”.

US suspending trade ties with China ‘hard to imagine’

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said of Trump’s announcement on Wednesday: “This is US internal politics, and I will not comment on it”.

Also working against Trump’s prospects as a candidate are the multiple criminal and civil probes against him, including a Justice Department investigation into alleged classified documents that Trump took when he left the White House.

Trump’s main obstacles to the White House is likely to come from his own Republican Party, many members of which have come out against him after Democrats won the US Senate in last week’s midterms.

Republican House candidates backed by Trump, who parroted the former president’s denial of the US 2020 election results, also fared worse than expected, although the party is expected to gain control of that chamber.

Trump lost his re-election bid in 2020, but did not concede and has made assertions that that the 2020 election was “rigged” and “stolen” part of his messaging in the lead-up to his announcement at Mar-a-Lago.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, touted by many Republicans and pundits as a candidate for US president in 2024, waves to supporters during his election night party in Tampa, Florida, on Nov. 8. Photo: Tampa Bay Times/TNS

Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano and Senate candidate Mehmet Oz in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania – both with strong Trump endorsements – were defeated decisively by their Democratic opponents.

Pundits are pointing to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who won his contest by a landslide last week, as one of the better-positioned Republicans to take on President Joe Biden in the 2024 election. Trump has already started taking potshots at the governor, recently calling him “Ron DeSanctimonious”.

“Trump won the 2016 nomination largely because primary candidate egos and failures to read the room resulted in a candidate with minority support – Trump – winning the nomination,” said Terry Haines, founder of Washington-based consultancy Pangaea Policy and former Congressional staffer.

“The Republican establishment rejecting Trump, not unlike a body rejecting a virus, points to a 2024 election cycle where that fragmentation is much less likely to happen,” he said.

DeSantis “makes that easy to see … but whether it’s DeSantis or someone else, the Republican establishment now is invested in denying Trump another shot at the nomination, and that’s a significant change.”