Trump Has Already Lost His Pricey China Trade War, Paul Krugman Warns

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman warned Sunday that President Donald Trump is handing China what it wants as the nations a trade war that has cost Americans billions of dollars.

“However Trump may try to spin this, he lost,” Krugman, a columnist for The New York Times, explained in a series of tweets. China learned, as did North Korea, that “Trump talks loudly but carries a small stick, and can be rolled,” he noted.

Trump has declared that the U.S. is close to reaching a “Phase One” agreement with China to settle his trade war. The deal is not yet finalized, nor have details been released.

But Krugman argues that China “hung tough” and is “basically ending up” where it started — buying American agricultural products while continuing to sell “increasingly sophisticated” manufactured goods to the U.S.

Key victims of the Trump’s trade war with China, meanwhile, have been American consumers because “despite many, many false claims by Trump,” they were stuck paying massive tariffs imposed on Chinese imports by the president, Krugman noted.

In addition, a gargantuan bailout for American farmers hit by retaliatory tariffs in Trump’s trade war is also being shouldered by U.S. taxpayers.

The aid — likely to hit $28 billion over two years — was not offered to any other American industry hurt by the trade war, only a segment of the population credited with Trump’s presidential victory. The handout is twice the size of the 2009 auto industry bailout provided by the Obama administration during the recession, Krugman pointed out.

Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today.

Despite the aid, farms are still going under, with bankruptcies up 24% this year.

Even with a “sustained deal” — “which is still far from certain,” Krugman noted, the U.S. will face major fallout from a mismanaged negotiation with China.

“Trump has made us weak, neither trusted by our allies nor feared by our enemies,” Krugman tweeted.

Krugman pointed out that even the trade war blunder may not hurt Trump politically.

“Elections turn not on how good things are, but on whether they’re perceived as getting better,” he pointed out. “This actually gives politicians an incentive to do stupid things for a while, then stop around a year before the election. Sound familiar?”

Also on HuffPost

This article originally appeared on HuffPost.