Trade war or war of words? Experts sound the alarm as China promises to 'fight to the end'

Experts warned Thursday that the United States and China are barreling towards a potentially catastrophic trade war, citing each country's increasingly heated rhetoric and unique economic pressure points.
Most Asian stock markets were holding early Friday, in an early sign that investors—for now--are brushing off concerns about the brewing brouhaha between the world's two biggest economies.
President Trump on Thursday called for Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. trade representative, to consider $100 billion in additional tariffs against China. The two nations have already slapped each other with planned tariffs totaling $50 billion this week.
But economic analysts said the situation -- which some U.S. news outlets have already branded a "trade war" -- could change rapidly, especially given the nations' ongoing war of words.
“This is what a trade war looks like, and what we have warned against from the start,” National Retail Federation President and CEO Matthew Shay said in an interview with Reuters.
For their part, Chinese officials said they won't capitulate to U.S. demands.

China and the U.S. have exchanged plans to impose sweeping tariffs on each others' exports this week.  (Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

"If someone wants a trade war, we will fight to the end,” Wang Shouwen, China’s commerce vice minister, told reporters Wednesday, after announcing a planned tax on U.S. goods, including airplanes and soybeans, the biggest U.S. export to China.
CHINA PROMISES TO FIGHT US 'AT ANY COST' AFTER TWO SIDES THREATEN HUGE TARIFFS
One trade policy expert specifically faulted Trump's communications strategy in an interview with the AP.
"Mr. Trump is upping the ante, but the lack of a clear game plan and an incoherent messaging strategy from the administration is setting this up for an all-out trade war rather than a fruitful negotiation," said Eswar Prasad, professor of trade policy at Cornell University.

"I like to say that there is a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow."

Chinese officials know they can effectively target specific sectors of the American economy, experts said, decreasing the likelihood that they will feel the need to retreat from the brink.
“The American agricultural sector is quite influential in the Congress,” Peking University economics professor told The New York Times. “China wants the American domestic political system to do the work.”
Some of that work was being done by Nebraska Republican Sen. Ben Sasse, who said this week that Trump was “threatening to light American agriculture on fire" and calling the White House's approach "the dumbest possible way to do this.”
China, by contrast, has unique tools to counteract U.S. tariffs, according to analysts. President Xi Jinping's government controls huge swaths of the country's economy and has an iron grip on the press, which would insulate the administration from some political and financial pressures in the short-term.
“My impression is that there is in Washington an exaggerated sense of how painful these tariffs might be” in China, Gavekal Dragonomics director Arthur R. Kroeber told the paper.
But as President Trump noted on Twitter on Wednesday, the U.S. runs a significant trade deficit with China, giving the White House its own blunt leverage.
"We are not in a trade war with China, that war was lost many years ago by the foolish, or incompetent, people who represented the U.S.," Trump wrote. "Now we have a Trade Deficit of $500 Billion a year, with Intellectual Property Theft of another $300 Billion."
Trump economic advisor Larry Kudlow told Fox Business that negotiations are underway, suggesting that talk of a trade war is premature.
“There is a process here, there’s going to be some back and forth, but there’s also some negotiations and we may talk about that, but that’s the key point," Kudlow said, describing Trump as "the first guy with a backbone in decades" to take some action on China — "at least preliminary actions."
Kudlow downplayed the urgency of the situation, saying tariff discussions won't play out overnight.
“In the United States at least, we’re putting it out for comment, it’s going to take a couple months," he said, referring to the proposed new tariffs. "I doubt if there will be any concrete action for several months. ... Trump’s putting his cards on the table. He’s standing up for this country, but he’s also standing up for better world trade.”
China on Thursday also formally challenged the U.S. tariffs at the WTO, setting the stage for a potentially lengthy legal battle.
The result of all the tension and brinksmanship, the White House says, will be a fairer international business climate for U.S. industries.
"I like to say that there is a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow," Kudlow told Politico this week.

Border Security Cartoons

Hillary Clinton says US in middle of 'war on truth, facts and reason'

Hillary Clinton said Wednesday night that the U.S. is "witnessing an all-out attack on core values of democracy," in what appeared to be the latest in a series of criticisms of the Trump administration.
The former Democratic presidential candidate was giving closing remarks at the annual Vital Voices Global Leadership Awards in Washington, D.C. The awards honor women leaders in human rights, economic empowerment for women or political reform.
Though Clinton did not mention Trump or specifically reference his administration, she lamented, "we're seeing a retreat from the commitment to embrace women’s advancement as an objective of U.S. foreign policy."
HILLARY CLINTON CLAIMS 'FOX NEWS IS ALWAYS TRYING TO IMPEACH ME'
"I don’t think it's a coincidence that at the same time, we are witnessing an all-out attack on core values of democracy: free speech and the rule of law," Clinton went on. "A war on truth, facts and reason. So women’s voices have always been vital, but never more so than right now."
Clinton has not been shy about criticizing Trump, who defeated her in the 2016 presidential race. One night earlier, speaking at a women-only workspace in New York City, the former first lady and secretary of state said America was in "a very bad spot."
"I think it's very unfortunate to contemplate but more can happen that would put our rights at risk, our freedom at risk, our values, our fundamental views about what it means to be Americans," she said.
Clinton also took a shot at Fox News, accusing the network of "always trying to impeach me."

Judge Andrew Napolitano: What Is Robert Mueller looking for?

Robert Mueller is the special counsel appointed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in May 2017 to probe the nature and extent of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. The investigation began in October 2016 under President Barack Obama when the FBI took seriously the boast of Carter Page, one of candidate Donald Trump’s foreign policy advisers, that he had worked for the Kremlin.
The FBI also had transcripts of telephone conversations and copies of emails and text messages of Trump campaign personnel that had been supplied to it by British intelligence. Connecting the dots, the FBI persuaded a judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to issue a search warrant for the surveillance of Page, an American.
Page never registered as a foreign agent, and working for the Kremlin and not registering as a foreign agent is a crime for which the FBI should have investigated Page. Such an investigation would have included surveillance, but not from the FISA court. Surveillance in a criminal case requires a search warrant from a U.S. District Court based upon the constitutional requirement of probable cause of crime -- meaning that it is more likely than not that the thing to be searched (internet and telephone communications) will produce evidence of criminal behavior.
But the FBI didn’t seek that. Instead, it sought a warrant to surveil Page’s communications based on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act standard, which is probable cause of communicating with a foreign power. This lower, easier-to-demonstrate and unconstitutional standard is the tool of choice these days for FBI agents because it requires less effort and is used in a court that grants 99.9 percent of search warrant applications.
The temptation to use the FISA court and its easy standard instead of a U.S. District Court and its privacy-recognizing constitutional standard to get a search warrant is often too much for the FBI to resist. This is a form of corruption because it presents a path for criminal investigators to invade the privacy of Americans that the Constitution protects.
Yet the FBI used whatever it learned from the surveillance of Page to get that surveillance extended. Even the Trump Department of Justice went to the FISA court to spy on Page. Lost in all this is the purpose of FISA -- to prevent government surveillance of Americans and limit it to agents of foreign powers.
When Jeff Sessions became attorney general, he recognized that he himself would most likely be a witness in the Mueller investigation because of his involvement in the Trump campaign, so he removed himself from all matters pertaining to Russia, and his deputy, Rosenstein, appointed Mueller to run the investigation.
What is Mueller looking for?
When the feds are examining a potential crime committed by a group, their treasure-trove of evidence can often be a member of the group who reveals the criminal behavior of his former colleagues. That’s why the feds often indict people for crimes that appear to be irrelevant to the ones they are investigating -- in this case, lying to the FBI and bank fraud allegedly committed before the 2016 election.
When such an indicted person can then be persuaded to turn on his former colleagues in return for a lesser charge or a lighter sentence, prosecutors can have a field day. This is a form of bribery -- you tell us on the witness stand what we want to hear and we’ll go easy on you -- that is permitted only to prosecutors; and the courts condone it. If defense counsel gave as much as a lollipop to a witness to shade his testimony, both would be indicted.
From the backgrounds of those whom Mueller’s grand juries have indicted and from the deals they have cut with him, it appears that Mueller is looking at three areas of potential criminal behavior. Mueller has already established as a base line the saturation of the 2016 presidential campaign by Russian intelligence agents. If his indictments of these Russians are accurate, they were here virtually and physically and they spent millions to help Trump. But the indicted Russians are not coming back to the U.S. for their trials.
Mueller is examining their potential American confederates for the crime of conspiracy -- or, as my colleagues in the media call it, collusion. This would be an agreement by campaign officials to accept something of value from a foreign person, entity or government, even if the thing of value -- for example, Hillary Clinton emails -- was never actually delivered. The crime is the agreement, and it is prosecutable after at least one of those who agreed takes a material step in furtherance of the agreement.
Mueller’s second area of examination is possible obstruction of justice by President Trump himself. Obstruction is the interference with a judicial proceeding for a corrupt purpose. Was FBI Director James Comey fired because Trump couldn’t work with him or because he was hot on the president’s trail and Trump wanted to impede that? If it was the former, it would have been licit. If it was the latter, it could have been criminal.
The third of Mueller’s areas is financial dealings by the pre-presidential Trump. These bear little surface relationship to Russian involvement in the campaign, yet evidence of wrongdoing must have come to Mueller from his FBI agents or his cooperating witnesses, and he is following the money as prosecutors do.
Where will all this go? The president cannot seem to find an experienced criminal defense lawyer. Mueller has 16 experienced federal prosecutors and a few dozen FBI agents passionately at work. And he also has witnesses he legally bribed and a few hundred thousand documents from the White House and from Trump’s financial affairs that the president has not personally reviewed.
And now Mueller wants to interview the president. Who will have the upper hand if that happens?
Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel.

Many presidents have bashed business, but Trump's Amazon offensive is personal

Donald Trump isn't the first president to take on a business or industry he doesn't like.
As the New York Times reminds us, Barack Obama once went after Staples for not providing adequate health care for its workers and slammed Wall Street banks over bonuses.
Bill Clinton's administration pushed an antitrust suit to break up Microsoft.
Jack Kennedy assailed steel executives for raising prices by saying "my father always told me that all businessmen were sons of bitches."
And FDR railed against "malefactors of great wealth."
But Trump's attacks on Amazon are being treated very differently—and most of his predecessors didn’t name the offending CEOs.
At this point, of course, it's just words. The president hasn't actually proposed to change any policy that affects Amazon. But he's repeatedly complained about Amazon unfairly benefitting from low Postal Service rates, and that initially knocked $60 billion off the value of the company’s stock. (Many companies have continued to lose value as the markets slide with China retaliating for Trump's tariffs.)
What makes this different is that Trump's case against Amazon is so personal—and linked to, as he has told me and others, Jeff Bezos’ separate ownership of the Washington Post, a newspaper that the president is convinced has treated him unfairly. (The Post insists that Bezos has nothing to do with its news coverage.)
Amazon, for its part, has said nothing, has issued no statement challenging the president on the facts. It's a secretive company that rarely responds to journalists, and this in my view is a failure of corporate communications, even if it wants the story to die down.
The Times piece makes a larger argument about the president’s approach to corporate America: "Lately, Mr. Trump's antibusiness rants have become particularly menacing and caused the stocks of some companies to plunge."
The story notes that over the years he has attacked companies as varied as Verizon, Coke, Nordstrom, Sony and H&R Block, as well as media giants.
He has criticized the proposed merger between Time Warner (which includes CNN) and AT&T, which is under antitrust review by his administration.
The president has also gotten results. Even before taking office, he threatened to cancel Boeing's deal to build the next generation of Air Force One planes—though in the end he knocked down the price from $4 billion to $3.9 billion.
Clearly, having a career businessman as president brings both strengths and weaknesses. He's accustomed to using hardball negotiations, pointed threats and lawsuits to get his way.
But a president, unlike a real estate developer, can decimate a company's stock with a few words.
There's nothing wrong with Trump trying to get a better deal for the beleaguered Postal Service (though he names most of the board members that run the service). Yet that would affect every package shipper, not just Amazon—which, by the way, is incredibly popular with consumers even as the site (and many others) have hurt brick-and-mortar stores.
It's the perception that this is a personal feud—tied to the president's resentment of Bezos and the Post—that undercuts his case.
Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of "MediaBuzz" (Sundays 11 a.m.). He is the author "Media Madness: Donald Trump, The Press and the War Over the Truth." Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.

Most border-state governors back Trump's National Guard plan

Governors of several states have voiced support for President Donald Trump's decision Wednesday to deploy National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, paving the way for the White House to implement its latest anti-illegal immigration policy.
The Republican governors of Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico -- three states that border Mexico -- backed the president's move, which officials said could lead to troops on the ground as early as Wednesday night.
Arizona "welcomes the deployment of National Guard to the border," Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey tweeted.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said Trump's action "reinforces Texas' longstanding commitment to secure our southern border."
In New Mexico, Gov. Susana Martinez said she appreciates the White House efforts to involve states in the policy-making.
READ TRUMP'S MEMO SENDING NATIONAL GUARD TO THE BORDER

"As Commander of Oregon’s Guard, I’m deeply troubled by Trump’s plan to militarize our border."

Even California Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown, who has openly sparred with the White House over his state's pro-illegal immigration policies, signaled that his administration might cooperate.
“This request – as with others we’ve received from the Department of Homeland Security, including those for additional staffing in 2006 and 2010 – will be promptly reviewed to determine how best we can assist our federal partners,” California National Guard spokesman Lt. Col. Tom Keegan said in a statement issued on behalf of Brown’s office. “We look forward to more detail, including funding, duration and end state."
The Trump administration has not released many specifics of its plan, but a lawmaker told the AP that Congress expects approximately 300 to 1,200 troops to be deployed at a cost of at least $60 million.
States farther from the border mostly avoided immediately responding to the issue. North Carolina Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper's office did not respond to a request for comment from the News & Observer in Raleigh.
Oregon's governor, also a Democrat, was more direct, promising to defy any request from the White House to send its troops.
STEVE KURTZ: CAN TRUMP LEGALLY SEND TROOPS TO THE BORDER?
"If @realDonaldTrump asks me to deploy Oregon Guard troops to the Mexico border, I’ll say no," Gov. Kate Brown tweeted. "As Commander of Oregon’s Guard, I’m deeply troubled by Trump’s plan to militarize our border."
The Trump administration has not requested any troops from Oregon, Brown noted. Under federal law, the president can override a state governor and effectively conscript National Guard troops into federal service.
But the White House, which has said the nation is at a "point of crisis" due to illegal immigration, has not sent any signals it will take that step, nor are there indications it will need Oregon's help.
WHITE HOUSE CALLS ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT INFLOW 'UNNACCEPTABLE'
While U.S. military forces are barred by law from carrying out domestic law enforcement actions, including some border security duties, they are generally permitted to assist federal agents in various ways.
The Mexican foreign ministry said late Wednesday that U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen promised that the troops "will not carry arms or carry out migration or customs control activities."
That was the general protocol for former President George W. Bush's deployment of National Guard troops to the border from 2006 to 2008, and former President Barack Obama's troop deployment, which began in 2010.

Voter Fraud Cartoons

Texas voter registration policy violates federal law, judge says

Texas' online driver's license registration system violates federal voting rights laws, a judge ruled in an order released Tuesday.  (AP)

Voter registration policies in Texas violate federal law, a U.S. District Court judge ruled in an order unveiled Tuesday, marking another voting-rights legal setback for the state's government.
Under the so-called "Motor Voter" provisions of the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, voters who apply for or renew their driver's license must be provided an opportunity to register to vote as well.
But Texans who went online to update their driver's license information ran into roadblocks that in-person applicants did not, according to the Texas Civil Rights Project, which brought the suit against Texas in 2016.
For example, the plaintiffs alleged, users who clicked “I want to register to vote" while updating their driver's license information were directed to a form that they had to print and mail. They also received a notification stating that clicking "yes" did not complete the voter registration process.
WATCH: TUCKER DISCUSSES REPORTED WIDESPREAD VOTER FRAUD IN TEXAS
That allegedly confounded some plaintiffs and led to "widespread confusion," according to the lawsuit. The online process amounted to an illegal stumbling block, given that the in-person process was smoother, the plaintiffs charged.
The plaintiffs specifically alleged that the unequal treatment of in-person voters, as compared to online ones, violated both the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause and federal law.

"For too long, the state of Texas has ignored federal voting rights laws."

“Everybody – all of our plaintiffs and many other people we have spoken to – once they get their driver’s license, they assume that their voter registration information has been updated, too,” Texas Civil Rights Project President Mimi Marziani told NPR. “And then they show up at the polls thinking they are going to be able to cast a ballot and they are not able to."
TEXAS VOTER ID LAW RULED LEGAL -- FOR NOW
U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia said a written opinion explaining the reasoning behind his ruling will be released within 14 days.
Texas does not currently permit online voter registration, according to the Texas Tribune, and may be forced to as a result of the ruling.
“For too long, the state of Texas has ignored federal voting rights laws intended to ensure that all eligible voters have an opportunity to register to vote,” Beth Stevens, voting rights director at the Texas Civil Rights Project, told the Texas Tribune. “We look forward to seeing deep changes in [the Texas Department of Public Safety’s] voter registration practices in the coming months, affecting well over a million Texans every year.”
The ruling is the latest in a string of voting-rights cases involving Texas. The state has spent years fighting to preserve both its voter ID law -- which was among the strictest in the U.S. -- and voting maps that were both passed by GOP-controlled Legislature in 2011.