Trump moves closer to break with China

It was two weeks ago here when I let the cat out of the bag on what I believe are President Trump’s true intentions on China. More evidence has rolled in over those two weeks to bolster my theory that Trump’s ultimate goal is to put the commies in China out of business.

He met privately with Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple. Cook complained, according to news reports, that his rival, Samsung, had an advantage since its phones were made in South Korea, the home of Samsung. Cook said the tariffs on China were putting him at a competitive disadvantage. Then Trump did something amazing that was glossed over by the media. He suggested Apple stop sourcing its products in China.

This is no small development. Were Apple to pull up stakes in China and start sourcing its products elsewhere it could trigger a stampede for the exits. 

Then the president made an even bolder statement which I believe reveals his true intent. He tweeted, “Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing your companies HOME and making your products in the USA.” Hard to get more direct than that. Experts scoffed that Trump doesn’t have the authority to “order” companies to leave China, but he just might. The International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 may allow him to do just that. The Congressional Research Service says it only applies during a time of war.

Could that be next?

I’ve long predicted that we will end up in a hot war with China over Taiwan. China has long claimed ownership of Taiwan under the so-called ‘One-China’ policy. The U.S. has recognized that policy ever since Richard Nixon sold us out with the Shanghai Communiqué of 1972. That communiqué has no force of law. The Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 does. That act allows, but does not require, us to defend Taiwan against the Chinese. 

The Chinese have never been happy about it, and they’ve continued to claim Taiwan as their own. Recently they’ve been conducting military exercises in the Taiwan Strait. Back in July they warned that if Taiwan declares independence there will be war. Trump’s response? He just sold 66 F-16 fighter jets to Taiwan. We could be closing in on the big showdown.

Here’s how events could go down. Taiwan declares itself an independent country, with the blessing of the United States. China invades. We send ships to the aid of Taiwan and we’re in a hot war. Remember that International Emergency Economics Powers Act that can only be triggered in time of war? Guess what.

About 18 percent of China’s exports go to the United States. That doesn’t include all of the U.S. companies that have put down roots there. What if all of a sudden every U.S. company instantly pulls out? That 18 percent of their exports also dries up almost instantly. How soon would it be before China collapsed? 

China is already buying their way into poor countries around the world with the Belt and Road Initiative. They build infrastructure for these cash-strapped nations. When they can’t pay the money back China essentially forecloses. They end up controlling these countries. President Trump’s well aware of this too. That was what behind the whole ‘buying Greenland’ story. They were going to mortgage themselves to the Chinese. Trump offered to buy them instead. The long and short of that story is China backed down. For now.

The Chinese government needs to be destroyed. And President Trump knows it.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast.

The 'White Nationalist Epidemic' lie

The mainstream media are becoming so transparent in their agenda that it’s a wonder anyone believes anything they report anymore. But, unfortunately, they do. The majority of Americans now believe President Trump is a racist, according to a recent Quinnipiac poll, even without an ounce of proof. The New York Times leads the charge, and they have ever since a few months before the 2016 election when they stated in their pages that journalists could no longer simply report the news. They had to actively work to defeat Donald Trump.

That obviously didn’t work, so they concocted this illusion that Trump had colluded with the Russians to steal the election. That fizzled as well. Now the Times is leading the charge to paint the president as a white supremacist. How do we know? Because someone leaked an audio recording of a meeting conducted by the Times’ executive editor, Dean Baquet. “We built our newsroom to cover one story [Russia collusion], and we did it truly well,” Baquet said. “Now we have to regroup, and shift resources and emphasis to take on a different story [Trump’s racism].”

Right on cue the rest of the mainstream media jumped into action. Now we’re seeing and hearing daily stories on how white nationalism is an epidemic and these white nationalists are taking their cues from Trump. MSNBC even had a former deputy director for counter intelligence at the FBI on to explain how Trump’s raising the flag to full staff after lowering it in respect for the shooting victims in El Paso and Dayton was a secret sign to the white supremacists. He said Trump was raising the flag on August 8. The number 8 means something special to the white supremacists. Eight means the letter ‘H’ which stands for Hitler. Raising the flag on 8/8, he said, means ‘Heil Hitler.’ You can’t make this stuff up!

Brett McGurk, senior foreign affairs analyst at MSNBC, claimed white nationalism was behind most domestic attacks since 9/11. I counted 81 mass killings since 2001. Three were racially motivated. And don’t forget the El Paso killer was an eco-terrorist who targeted Hispanics because he believed the influx of new people into the country was destroying the environment.

By the way, of those 81 mass killings, 9 were carried out by Islamic extremists. There were several more where fewer than 4 people were killed, the threshold for the FBI’s definition of a mass killing. What’s even more disturbing is to think that less than 1 percent of the population in America is Muslim. Nine mass murders by less than 1 percent of the population is huge.

Of course, Don Lemon at CNN says white males are the biggest terrorist threat to America. There’s no doubt that white men usually are behind mass shootings, but mass shootings are seldom acts of terrorism. What Lemon and others purposely ignore is that half the murders in this country are committed by black males. That’s a far bigger problem that I believe can be traced to our failed housing projects, as I’ve written here before.

Be forewarned that many of your news sources have gone rogue. Dispensing of information is no longer a service, it’s a weapon. Many of the trusted news outlets are on a mission to make sure Donald Trump is not re-elected in 2020. I wish it were not so, but it is.

In an age where information is literally at our fingertips any time we want it you’d think we’d be well-informed. Instead we’re misinformed, which is far worse even than being uninformed. 

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast.

Trump's ultimate plan for China

All eyes are on China these days. The dreaded tariffs that the so-called experts told us would devastate our economy have yet to come true. Could those tariffs be part of a broader plan from President Trump? More on that in a moment.

The president claims that China is paying the bulk of the tariffs, that the U.S. consumer is not. There’s one angle that all of the experts are missing, one key indicator that Trump is right. We import about 17.7 percent of our goods from China. Despite well over 70 percent of the items you buy in Walmart coming from China, only 17.7 percent of our goods across the economy come from China, according to government figures. Still, that’s a lot of stuff. If we as consumers were actually paying a 25 percent tariff on 17.7 percent of the things we buy inflation would be rising. It’s not.

The consumer price index, which is, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “a measure of the average change over time in the prices paid by urban consumers for a market basket of consumer goods and services,” is actually trending down. Lower energy costs are driving the overall number down, but take energy out of the equation and we’re still only running at 2.1 percent inflation. The latest numbers for June have us down to 1.6 percent for the month. In other words, a 25 percent tariff on 17.7 percent of the goods we’re buying has so far had no effect whatsoever.

If China is taking the hit for the tariffs how are they doing it. And why? First as to why. The communist Chinese government is a partner in every Chinese company. As those companies go, so goes China. They have a vested interest in keeping their products competitive on the American market. China is able to avoid a price increase in the United States by doing two things. 

First they can devalue their own currency thus making the product cheaper in real dollars for American importers. They’ve been known to do this with regularity. Trump has always called them a currency manipulator. They were officially designated as such from 1992 to 1994. The U.S. Treasury department just officially designated China as a currency manipulator, confirming what President Trump has been saying.

The second way they stay competitive despite the U.S. tariffs is to lower the prices of their goods to importers in the United States. Let’s say you have an item that wholesales for $10. You slap a 25 percent tariff on that item and the importer has to jack up the price by $2.50. But what if China lowers that wholesale price to $8? The tariffs raise the price to $10 and the importer is right back where he was.

Lower prices and currency devaluing are very expensive. When China devalues its currency it may make their goods more attractive here, but it costs their consumers more to import goods from everywhere in the world. And they import a lot of goods.

This is where I think Trump has laid out a brilliant strategy. This is not something he would ever say publicly. I believe Trump’s ultimate goal with the tariffs is to bring the communists in China to their knees. Before you scoff remember that the so-called experts were telling us in 1988 that the Soviet Union would last a thousand years, that they were in much better shape economically than the U.S. A year later they were gone.

Could China be to Trump what the USSR was to Reagan?

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast.

El Paso killer was an eco-terrorist

How often have I told you that media bias isn’t necessarily what they tell you, it’s what they don’t? Well, the El Paso shooting is a shining example. The news media, especially CNN, focused on the ‘white nationalist’ angle and tried to somehow tie that to Trump. What they didn’t tell you is the guy is a whacked-out environmentalist who thinks there are too many people in the country and he needs to kill off some. In other words, he’s an eco-terrorist.

Did CNN tell you that? Not even Fox News, whose higher-ups support the manmade global warming theory, wanted you to know that. Not one major news organization posted the guy’s manifesto that I could find. I posted it on Facebook and it was promptly blocked by the Facebook censors. They said it made some Facebook users feel ‘unsafe.’ 

Unsafe? You know what’s unsafe? Not getting the full story on a crazed killer. Not being able to see his writings and understand where he was coming from, as twisted as his logic might be. After every one of these types of shootings we all wonder what was going through the killer’s mind. In this case he maps out everything, even the weaponry he chose and why he chose it.

The media folks will claim they don’t want to encourage other killers by posting his writings. Fox News Alert: It’s not the writings that encourage copycat killers. It’s the round-the-clock coverage from the news channels. There’s no discussion of ignoring this story because it might prompt another killing. Nor should there be any talk like that. This is not only a news story it’s an epidemic. In order to cure the epidemic we need information, yet the news media and Facebook think you need less information. That’s so they can cherry-pick from the manifesto and spoon-feed you their version of his motivation.

By the way, the Dayton killer’s motivation got loose before the information czars could put a lid on it. That guy was a far-left socialist Antifa Elizabeth Warren supporter. Not one person at CNN or other liberal outlets said Elizabeth Warren was responsible and should tone down her rhetoric.

But wait until you read some of what the El Paso killer wrote. He wrote, “our lifestyle is destroying the environment.” He wrote that oil companies were polluting our water and our “consumer culture is creating thousands of tons of unnecessary plastic waste.” He wrote that “the average American isn’t willing to change their lifestyle, even if the changes only cause a slight inconvenience.” In fact, he titled his piece ‘The Inconvenient Truth.’ Where do you think he got all that? No, we shouldn’t be blaming Al Gore for the shooting, but we surely shouldn’t be blaming President Trump. This guy was the odd blend of an Occupy Wall Street radical environmentalist and a white separatist. The fact that he went on a shooting rampage is no one’s fault but his own.

I have to say that in the wake of the recent shootings I felt like I was in the Soviet Union. Watching CNN was like watching the TASS news service. It was not just the disinformation and misinformation, it was purposeful hiding of all of the information. I knew the real story about the eco-terrorism angle. Most people, unfortunately, did not, and still don’t. When I tried to alert the public via Facebook I was censored.

Our critical information services are in crisis. Services like Facebook are supposed to be our way around them. Now they are them.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast.