Heading into the G-20 Summit later this week in Osaka, Japan, President Donald Trump will meet with China’s President Xi and other world leaders to continue fighting for U.S. interests abroad. Unlike past presidents, President Trump understands that economic security and national security are one and the same. The working men and women of America, on our farms and in our factories, are not only key to the strength of our national economy but to the security of our great nation. In no area is the president fighting for a stronger America — and winning — than in the realm of international trade.
When the political and economic establishment and globalist G-20 leaders attack the president’s tariffs and trade negotiations as damaging to what they call “free trade,” remember the facts: The system in which America trades looks nothing like the system of “free trade” they learned about in their college economics textbooks.
Instead of peacefully cooperating nations, all with the same goal of benefiting from trade, we have a system dominated by nations which engage in all kinds of ways to cheat international trade laws for their own benefit. Although several nations have engaged in many kinds of unfair trade practices against the United States over the years, China stands at the forefront of this misbehavior.
Hackers from the Chinese government regularly penetrate into American companies’ computer systems to steal trade secrets. Hijacking everything from electronic component designs for American smartphones to software used to run wind turbines, there is no limit to the theft of American ingenuity that goes on every day at the hands of China. This not only is damaging to the bottom-lines of American companies, but also to our national security, as many great American enterprises leading the world in engineering and information technology serve as private-sector partners to our government agencies, using their products and services to help secure our nation.
Unfair trade practices regularly exercised by the Chinese also cause direct harm to the finances of the American consumer. There exists a whole class of Chinese entrepreneurs that make a living by stealing American designs and intellectual property to produce cheap, counterfeit versions of consumer goods. A recent report by the Government Accountability Office revealed that in a sample of four categories of frequently counterfeited goods — shoes, cosmetics, travel mugs and phone chargers — more than 40 percent of listings stated to be authentic in online third-party marketplaces were counterfeit. These counterfeiting operations result in losses of billions of dollars to American companies every year, a loss of trust in online marketplaces, and a flooding of the international markets with counterfeit products that cheat unsuspecting American consumers out of their hard-earned money.
On an industrial scale, the behavior we see coming from Asia’s biggest economy rivals what we see on the consumer level. State-controlled steel and aluminum corporations in China receive high amounts of government subsidies that allow them to dump their products on American soil at prices so low that American companies can’t compete. This not only weakens our military-industrial base by increasing our dependence on foreign steel, but it eviscerates a core American industry, causing steel and aluminum workers over the past decade to lose their jobs.
This is the type of “free trade” that the establishment fights so fiercely to protect, and that the G-20 prides itself on, in the never-ending assault on President Trump’s “America First” trade agenda. This system, and all its excesses against the United States, went unchecked for decades until the American people elected Donald Trump to be a change-maker. Since 2016, the president’s actions on this front speak for themselves.
For American corporations, President Trump has announced steps to protect domestic technology and intellectual property from abuses by China and other nations around the world. Most recently, after good faith efforts to negotiate a new trade deal with China, which chose to backtrack on major provisions after agreeing to those, President Trump imposed tariffs to send a clear message to Beijing that, while the U.S. would love to work out a deal, the days of taking advantage of the United States in international trade are over.
At this week’s G-20 Summit, President Trump will meet with President Xi once again to talk about, among other things, trade. It’s in China’s best interest to come to the table with a mindset toward resolution. But even if it doesn’t, the president knows the importance of fixing the broken trading system upon which the U.S.-China relationship rests and he will take every action to ensure America keeps its upper hand. Regardless of pressure from the establishment, the media and leaders around the globe, President Trump will always fight to make sure our trading relationship with China — and all members of the G-20 — puts America first.
Corey R. Lewandowski is President Trump’s former campaign manager and co-host of the podcast “Deep in the Swamp.” He is a senior adviser to the Great America Committee, Vice President Mike Pence‘s political action committee. He is co-author with David Bossie of “Trump’s Enemies” and of “Let Trump Be Trump: The Inside Story of His Rise to the Presidency.” Follow him on Twitter @CLewandowski_.