Still, even as they attack the president, many of the candidates are also doing a delicate dance around the fact that they agree with Trump that China isn’t playing by the rules.
Mayor Pete Buttigieg said he would remove the current tariffs on China, if elected, but didn’t rule out making them part of a strategy in the future.
China Threat
“If we really want to be serious about competing with China, we’ve got to invest in American domestic competitiveness,” he said at an event hosted by the Washington Post last month. “We’ve got to figure out how we can have a more orderly disentanglement of things like 5G technology where they’re establishing technological superiority. And we have to build a global framework where we’re competing with China on our terms instead of theirs.”
Warren also signaled she would consider tariffs, but she emphasized they would need to be part of a coherent strategy that includes working with American allies, a rebuke of Trump’s go-it-alone approach.
“We should have all of our allies working together to push back jointly against China’s unfair trade policies, but that starts by building an alliance, not by tweeting in the atmosphere,” she said last month during a three-day swing through Iowa.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.