On Wednesday, President Donald Trump abruptly announced a 90-day pause on most of his planned country-specific “reciprocal” tariffs– with the notable exception of the People’s Republic of China. In so strikingly singling out China as the focus of America’s economic and geopolitical ire, Trump was not merely clarifying that the United States views China and its regnant Communist Party as our leading 21st-century threat–he was also taking yet another notable step toward fulfilling his own lifelong goal of fundamentally resetting the terms of the U.S.-China bilateral relationship.

As an “outer-borough” native New Yorker from Queens, Trump has long seen things differently than most of his white-shoe brethren and fellow one-percenters living across the (literal and proverbial) river in Manhattan. Throughout virtually his entire career, Trump has served as a “class traitor” archetype –someone who, as I wrote in an essay last year, “may hold ‘elite’ ruling class credentials, but whose hearts, minds, concerns and general sensibilities are decidedly with the country class.” That is the essence of Trump’s nationalist-populist MAGA political coalition. But it’s also who Trump has been since his earliest interviews with the New York City tabloids and TV hosts all those decades ago.

There is no better example than trade, Trump’s most consistently held political position. In the 1980s, he was alarmed at the rise of Japan as an economic superpower, arguing that America’s trade deficit with Japan was problematic and that the U.S. should respond with crippling tariffs. (It seems that Ronald Reagan, who in........

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