On the menu today: The 2024 Republican nominee for president, Donald Trump, pledges to preserve TikTok to get back at “Zuckerschmuck.” In light of Trump going to bat for the Chinese-owned app pumping out anti-Israel propaganda, it’s worth reviewing Trump’s comments from earlier this year, in which he characterized Taiwan as more of an economic competitor than a vulnerable strategic ally. In food and energy markets, shipping costs, and the activation of violent antisemitic yahoos, we see the problems created by hostile states and factions impacting the daily lives of Americans. It’s a great big dangerous world out there, and lately, we’re not even bringing our “C-minus game,” let alone our “A game.”
Trump Flips on TikTok
Last week, the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 50 to 0 — rare complete bipartisan unity — to move on legislation that would ban TikTok from the U.S. if its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, doesn’t sell it within six months.
Back at the end of July 2020, President Trump declared he intended to ban TikTok, recognizing the popular Chinese-owned app as a national-security threat. “As far as TikTok is concerned, we’re banning them from the United States,” he told reporters while aboard Air Force One.
Paul Nakasone, the general who until February served as director of the National Security Agency and commander of U.S. Cyber Command, described TikTok as “a loaded gun at our nation’s head,” for reasons of cybersecurity and spyware, and as a tool of Chinese government propaganda. Nakasone was selected for NSA director by Trump, and confirmed by the U.S. Senate unanimously. TikTok is banned from all U.S. government devices.
But Trump just flip-flopped on TikTok, declaring his opposition to getting rid of it.
It’s possible this reflects the influence of billionaire hedge-fund manager and GOP megadonor Jeff Yass, whose fund has a $33 billion stake in ByteDance. But Trump’s publicly stated reason for supporting TikTok is the personal grudge he holds against Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook:
If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business. I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better. They are a true Enemy of the People!
Trump also recently once again sang the praises of Viktor Orbán, while the Hungarian government develops closer security and trade ties with Putin, Xi Jinping, and the Iranian mullahs.
How Trump Thinks about Taiwan
If China invades Taiwan, you may or may not lose your job, but there’s a good chance the economic repercussions will hit your life in some way.
As Nicholas Kristof wrote in January, “Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company is the only corporation I can think of in history that could cause a global depression if it were forced to halt production.” TSMC makes 11,895 different types of products for 528 customers, including chips for Apple, Qualcomm, Nvidia, Intel, Sony, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. TMSC also makes the chips that the Pentagon uses in weapons systems like the F-35 fighter jet, missiles, and command-and-control gear. About 50 percent of all medical devices have a semiconductor.
“Logic chips” are the brains of electronic devices. In November, a U.S. International Trade Commission study concluded:
About 44.2 percent of U.S. imports of logic chips were manufactured in Taiwan, compared to 24.4 percent of memory chips and 1.0 percent of analog chips. In a hypothetical scenario of a major manufacturing disruption in Taiwan, we find that the U.S. logic chip segment would experience the largest negative impacts, which may lead to as high as a 59 percent increase in the price of logic chips that U.S. downstream producers would have to pay.
Last October, Connie Chang, the director general of overall planning for Taiwan’s National Development Council, told me, “Honestly speaking, if something happened to Taiwan, probably half of the world’s industries will shut down.” And that pales in comparison to the consequences of what would likely be a catastrophic loss of human life.
Annually, we buy $105 billion in goods and services from Taiwan, and Taiwan buys $54 billion in goods and services from us. It is our eighth-largest trading partner.
One study calculated, “The global disruption from a Taiwan conflict would put well over two trillion dollars in economic activity at risk, even before factoring in the impact from international sanctions or a military response.” Another calculated the risk at “around $10 trillion. That would be significantly larger than the biggest disruptions in recent memory, including the Covid pandemic and the global financial crisis, leaving virtually no part of the world unaffected.”
It is hard to think of a higher priority for the U.S. government than deterring a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Alas, as mentioned last week, President Biden likes to boast, “We’re standing up for peace and stability across the Taiwan Straits,” but we have failed to deliver $19.1 billion in weapons to Taiwan that we promised and that the Taiwanese have already paid for.
In an interview with Maria Bartiromo in late January, Donald Trump did not sound like he had any particular interest in defending Taiwan from a Chinese invasion:
MARIA BARTIROMO: Would the U.S. help defend Taiwan, if it means going to war with China?
DONALD TRUMP: Well, I don’t want to say it, because if I’m in the position of president, I don’t want to say what I’m thinking. You know, I just — if I answer that question, it will put me in a very bad negotiating position. With that being said, Taiwan did take all of our chip business. You know, we used to make our own chips. Now they’re made in Taiwan, 90 percent of the chips—
BARTIROMO: Advanced semiconductor chips, 90 percent—
[Crosstalk]
BARTIROMO: China goes in there, they’ll be able to turn the world on and off, isn’t that right?
TRUMP: If China takes Taiwan, they will turn the world off. Potentially. I mean, potentially. But remember this, Taiwan took — smart, brilliant — they took our business away. We should have stopped them. We should have taxed them. We should have tariffed them.
From his comments, it appears safe to conclude Trump perceives Taiwan more as an economic competitor than as a strategic ally or as a democracy worth defending.
Last May, Warren Buffett, the “Oracle of Omaha,” sounded like he could see the writing on the wall, and no longer saw Taiwan as a safe place to invest. Buffett sold his conglomerate’s remaining shares in TSMC, because he wasn’t confident that his investments were secure in Taiwan. On an analyst call, Buffett said, “I don’t like its location, and I’ve reevaluated that. . . . I feel better about the capital that we’ve got deployed in Japan than Taiwan. I wish it weren’t so, but I think that’s the reality, and I’ve reevaluated that in the light of certain things that were going on.”
Problems That Seem Far Away May Be Closer Than They Appear
Right around four years ago today, we learned that what happens in a lab in Wuhan can have enormous impact on your daily life. The subsequent consequences to the Chinese government were minimal, although someone recently pointed out to me that the ongoing, gradual fits-and-starts “decoupling” of the U.S. and Chinese economies can be seen as a consequence of the pandemic and the Chinese government’s suspicious refusal to cooperate with international inquiries.
Those problems that may appear far away can have consequences close to home:
- When Russia invaded Ukraine, prices jumped in the global food and energy markets. Food prices gradually decreased some as other producers increased exports to fill in the gap, but in many parts of the world, energy prices remain elevated.
- Hamas attacked Israel, and every antisemitic yahoo around the world interpreted it as a green light to attack Jews in every corner of free societies.
- Iran-backed Houthis are attacking cargo vessels passing through the Red Sea, and the cost of international shipping is getting higher. Notice that the Houthis are not attacking Chinese-flagged vessels.
- Hackers in Russia shut down the Colonial Pipeline, and gas prices jumped about 20 cents a gallon in much of the southeast.
Everywhere around the globe, autocrats, extremists, and other enemies of America are playing for keeps — probing, looking for weak spots, looking for new forms of leverage. And whether or not you realize it, you live with the consequences — in energy, food, and shipping costs, and in nutjobs who feel comfortable attacking rabbis in Washington, shooting people as they leave a synagogue in Los Angeles, and attacking an Orthodox Jew in Broward County, Fla.*
Late last summer in a conversation in Kyiv, Maryan Zablotskiy, a member of Ukraine’s parliament, described to me what he called an “Axis of A**holes” operating around the world — a loose coalition of hostile states and allied groups attacking the innocent, seeking to destabilize and attack free countries, undermining democracies and the Western alliance, and conquering territory.
We are up against that axis, whether we like it or not. And never mind bringing our A game, we’re not even bringing our C-minus game.
We’re in the Best of Hands, America
There are people who want the conclusion of the review of this dangerous world to be, “and that’s why you have to vote for Donald Trump in November.” And there are people who want the conclusion to be, “and that’s why you have to vote for Joe Biden in November.”
I just see two geriatric, well-past-their-prime, shouting, cranky, forgetful, narcissistic geezers who will abandon allies (NATO and Taiwan for Trump, Israel and our Afghan allies for Biden) for the slightest short-term political advantage. I know that, barring some sudden health issue, there’s probably a high 90-some-percent chance that one of these two “Grumpy Old Men” will be taking the oath of office on January 20, 2025.
We’ll see who Trump’s running mate is, and maybe we can hope that that person has better judgment than he does and ascends to the presidency sooner rather than later. Kamala Harris appears likely to offer the same policies and worldview as Biden, just in a younger, healthier body. Or perhaps a Harris administration would steer even further to the left.
Or we can see whom No Labels serves up. Right now, that effort feels a bit like a game show: “Or, you can bet it all on whichever presidential candidate is behind door number three!” No Labels is expected to announce “the process for how candidates will be selected for the Unity Ticket on Thursday, March 14.”
*The sheer number of attacks on Jews in the U.S., Canada, and Western Europe makes me wonder if Hamas and like-minded Islamist extremist groups have figured out how to use propaganda and ideology that reaches ordinary, garden-variety nutjobs, and gives them a sense of purpose and moral crusade, by striking out violently at scapegoats — in other words, weaponizing America’s mentally unstable against the rest of us. Back in 2019, I imagined a scenario like that in fiction. Now, we get to see it in reality.
ADDENDA: Our Luther Ray Abel lays out how the idea of the U.S. military constructing a pier off the coast of the Gaza strip is every bit as dangerous and unworkable as it appeared at first glance.
Becket Adams reminds us that former federal judge Michael Luttig, frequent NBC News guest and unofficial White House legal adviser Laurence Tribe, and former acting U.S. solicitor general Neal Katyal all insisted, frequently and vehemently, that the Colorado Supreme Court had gotten it legally and constitutionally right when they kicked Trump off the ballot. And then the Supreme Court rejected Colorado’s move, 9–0. Their whole job is to analyze the strength of legal arguments. Adams asks, “Were the experts really this wrong on the merits of the Colorado court decision (as they were wrong about “collusion”), were they lying to others or themselves, or were they merely playing to their particular audience’s desires?”