The Advancing American Freedom Foundation, founded by former Vice President Mike Pence, has released a memo arguing that President Trump is risking his legacy on China policy with his approach to Beijing on TikTok, tariffs, and national security measures. The memo states that to beat China, President Trump must return to his first administration’s ‘Tough on China’ approach, not bow down to Beijing.
Pence’s group points to the Trump administration’s handling of TikTok, where the president has granted repeated extensions of a deadline for the video-sharing app’s parent company to divest or face a U.S. ban. Congress last year passed a law that required TikTok’s China-based parent company ByteDance to sell the app amid growing privacy and national security concerns. The memo also criticizes Trump’s agreement with Nvidia to provide 15% of its revenue generated from selling artificial intelligence chips to China, which the memo argues plays right into Beijing’s playbook of obtaining foreign trade secrets through coercion or theft and displacing foreign competitors.
The memo also targets Trump’s tariffs, which have “kneecapped American small businesses, which overwhelmingly rely on Chinese goods and lacked adequate time to rearrange supply chains in response to tariffs.” Trump has imposed sweeping tariffs on dozens of trading partners, including major economies like Japan, South Korea, the European Union, China, and Canada. Some Republicans, Democrats, and economists have warned that the tariffs will lead to higher prices and disproportionately hurt small businesses that can’t negotiate a workaround.
Trump has defended his use of tariffs, arguing that the U.S. has been ripped off for years and that revenue coming into the U.S. from tariffs amounts to a tax on consumers. He has more broadly asserted a positive relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping and expressed a desire to see both countries do well.
