Why Anti-China Economics is Failing
Bidenomics is all but dead. Trump is against EVs. Tariff walls are increasing costs for all. Both parties are failing the working class, because they’re working FOR capital AGAINST China.
Trump’s transition team is putting a knife in the crown jewel of Bidenomics. Specifically, they’re recommending rolling back emissions and fuel efficiency standards, eliminating the consumer EV tax credit, and producing more gas-powered vehicles, according to a new document obtained by Reuters.
Trump’s team aims to:
redirect money now flowing to building charging stations and making EVs affordable into national-defense priorities, including securing China-free supplies of batteries and the critical minerals to build them.
The recommendations also include ending Department of Defense EV procurement programs and restricting the import of batteries, battery parts, critical minerals, and parts for charger production (through Section 232 tariffs). This would effectively force US manufacturers to create their own de-globalized supply chain in a world where the majority of critical inputs for EVs are owned or controlled by BRICS nations (especially China).
But while what’s shaping up here will kill the promise of the American EV industry, the recommendations do not amount to full-throated opposition to EVs. Trump’s transition team is additionally suggesting:
using the Export-Import bank to support EV manufacturers,
waiving environmental reviews for battery production and recycling (which will harm the environment but could reduce costs), and
imposing global tariffs on the EV supply chain in the hopes that it can negotiate market access bilaterally as a way to sell uncompetitive US EVs into foreign markets.
Are you surprised by these contradictions? It was all part of Project 2025!
This is a series of bad bets that is begging for the rest of the world to either gang up on America or to leave America isolated economically while increasing circulation within primarily East Asian supply chains.
Predictably enough, Trump’s people are using the China threat to force a choice. Either make the capitalist world-system a more overtly American economic empire, literally, or else make America autarkic, deploying force beyond borders mainly as a form of primitive accumulation (extraction, dispossession, or resource-hoarding) for its economic needs. Either way, America’s ruling class wins because consolidated empire and consolidated nationalism both create new opportunities for grift and speculative capital.
There’s more.