Candidate Donald Trump could not have been clearer. On the first day of his presidency, he wrote i late 2015 his administration would deem China a “currency manipulator.”
He repeated his allegation of Chinese manipulation in rally speeches and interviews over the course of the 2016 campaign. Even after his first day in the Oval Office came and went, even after expert after expert pointed out that China had stopped devaluing its yuan, Trump was unrelenting.
“You know, when you talk about, when you talk about currency manipulation, when you talk about devaluations, they are world champions,” he told the Financial Times last week. “And our country hasn’t had a clue, they haven’t had a clue . . . but I do.”
Trump did another interview with a business-focused newspaper on Wednesday. This time, there was no hint of the China-bashing rhetoric of the last two years.
Trump told the Wall Street Journal that he would not label China as a manipulator after all. His explanation: “They’re not currency manipulators.”
This was only one of five separate reversals on a day that was dizzying even by Trump-era dizziness standards.
Over the course of two interviews and a news conference, the president and his administration managed to discard his previous views on China, NATO, interest rates, the national Debt and the Export-Import Bank.
His flip-flops came six days after he reversed his vocal opposition to military action against the Syrian regime. On the whole, the Wednesday reversals offered more evidence for a conclusion that has seemed apparent since the first month of his tenure: Trump has few political convictions, little commitment to many of his campaign promises and a tendency to change his mind depending on the television show he has just watched or who he has last spoken with.
His reversal on Chinese currency followed his first meeting with President Xi Jinping. He told the Journal that Xi had also swayed him to dispose of another claim he had frequently repeated: that China could easily solve the problem posed by North Korea.
Why?
“After listening for 10 minutes, I realized it’s not so easy,” he said.
As a candidate, he had criticized the Export-Import Bank as “unnecessary.” It “turns out,” he told the Journal, that the bank helps small companies.
“Actually, it’s a very good thing,” he said.
Trump boasted last week of his “flexibility,” portraying himself as someone willing to adapt to change. His Wednesday flip-flops, some observers noted, all involved him moving in the direction of moderates and internationalists rather than right-wingers or nationalists.
“Trump is reversing policies on NATO, Russia, China and other foreign policy positions. And all of these reversals are good for U.S. standing,” MSNBC host Joe Scarborough said on Twitter.
But the unreliability of Trump’s word and his evident unfamiliarity with basic policy knowledge have caused deep discomfort around the world as allies flail to discern his intentions. In a Tuesday Washington Post article, foreign ambassadors anonymously complained that the president was unprepared, uncommunicative and incoherent.
“Nobody can tell us on Russia what the American policy is, on Syria what the American policy is, on China what the American policy is,” one said. “I’m not sure there is a policy.”
Trump said during his campaign that NATO was “obsolete.” He later tiptoed away from that view, falsely claiming his criticism forced the alliance into addressing terrorism for the first time. At his news conference on Wednesday with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, he said, “I said it was obsolete. It’s no longer obsolete.”
As a candidate, he said Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen was keeping interest rates “artificially low” to help Barack Obama. Wednesday, he said, “I do like a low-interest rate policy” — reverting to his stance of earlier in the campaign.
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