U.S. President Donald Trump’s rapid-fire escalation of attacks on China — from bans of WeChat and TikTok to sanctions on Hong Kong’s top official — underscores that he’s dropped past restraint and decided to make confronting Beijing his priority less than 90 days before the U.S. election.
The president’s increasingly aggressive stance has opened the door for hard-liners in the administration to push policies delivering on their long-held conviction that Communist Party leaders are bent on world domination, and that successive U.S. administrations underestimated the China threat.
"A dam has broken in the Trump administration, releasing all the pent-up ideas about how to escalate conflict with China,” said Graham Webster, China Digital Economy Fellow at the New America think tank. "It’s both a race to change facts on the ground and cement a durable enmity and a tool to distract from things that could damage Trump re-election prospects.”