“If you look at what China is doing to our country, it’s disgraceful. … They’re making all of our products. We’re not manufacturing anything. They’re making all our products, and they’re selling [them] to us. And then they’re loaning us the money. … They take the money, then they loan it back to us. We should be fighting China.” —Donald Trump during a 2010 interview with Larry King

“[China] is making all our products. They’re taking all our jobs. And then they loan the money back and we pay them interest. It’s an amazing phenomenon. China is an abuser of the United States. China is not our friend.” —Donald Trump during a 2011 CNN interview with Poppy Harlow

Perhaps the deadliest plague that affects America is the lethal combination of group-think and self-conferred, credential-based gravitas we label as “expertise.” Ever since Richard Nixon’s historic visit to Communist China in 1972, the “irrefutable” wisdom espoused by these Ruling Class elites — in both parties and several administrations — was that contact with the West would “democratize” China.

Nothing has been, or could be, further from the truth. Moreover, presidents from both parties were equally myopic.

“Everything I have learned about China as president and before — and everything I have learned about human nature in a half-century of living — convinces me that we have a far greater chance of having a positive influence on China’s actions if we welcome China to the world community instead of shutting it out,” stated Bill Clinton during his tenure.

“Open trade is a force for freedom in China, a force for stability in Asia, and a force for prosperity in the United States. When we open trade, we open minds. We trade with China because trade is good policy for our economy, because trade is good policy for democracy, and because trade is good policy for our national security,” echoed George W. Bush.

“The United States welcomes the rise of a China that is peaceful, stable, prosperous, and a responsible player in global affairs,” insisted Barack Obama.

During the aforementioned 2011 interview with Poppy Harlow, it was Harlow, not Trump, who inadvertently confirmed the wisdom of Trump’s assessment of the Chinese Communists’ dangerous ambitions. After Trump warned that China was “going to replace us in 12 years or less as the great economic power of the world,” Harlow was skeptical. “The [Chinese] economy would have to more than triple to take over ours,” she insisted.

Here’s a graph of Chinese economic growth since then. In 2010, it overtook Japan, nearly tripling that country’s GDP by a $13.6 trillion to $4.9 trillion margin. By 2019, China’s GDP reached more than $16 trillion. More important, in terms of “purchasing power parity” (PPP), an economic theory that compares the purchasing power of various world currencies to one another, China’s economy overtook the United States in 2014.

Much of that rise has to do with currency manipulation. And once again, Trump sounded the alarm years ago. A trade-policy position posted in 2015 on Trump’s campaign website stated the following: “We must stand up to China’s blackmail and reject corporate America’s manipulation of our politicians. The U.S. Treasury’s designation of China as a currency manipulator will force China to the negotiating table and open the door to a fair — and far better — trading relationship.”

In addition, the campaign illuminated the odious status quo. “We have been too afraid to protect and advance American interests and to challenge China to live up to its obligations,” it stated. “We need smart negotiators who will serve the interests of American workers — not Wall Street insiders that want to move U.S. manufacturing and investment offshore.”

In 2016, columnist Bryan Rich revealed that Trump was spot on. “China’s biggest and most effective tool is and always has been its currency,” he explained. “China ascended to the second largest economy in the world over the past two decades by massively devaluing its currency, and then pegging it at ultra-cheap levels.”

The result? “With the massive devaluation of the 1980s into the early 1990s, and then the peg through 2005, the Chinese economy exploded in size,” Rich added. “It enabled China to corner the world’s export market, and suck jobs and foreign currency out of the developed world. This is precisely what Donald Trump is alluding to when he says ‘China is stealing from us.’”

Stealing is only part of the equation. In 2019, China allocated $177 billion to its military budget. Our 2019 trade deficit with China went down to $345.6 billion. That represented a 17.6% decline in the trade deficit. Yet as Americans can clearly see, we still underwrote China’s entire military budget — with billions to spare.

Thus, we didn’t just undermine our economy. We also undermined our national security.

That aforementioned decline was precipitated by Trump’s insistence that we impose tariffs on China — a move that appalled the so-called experts. “President Trump, emboldened by America’s economic strength and China’s economic slowdown, escalated his trade war with Beijing,” asserted The New York Times in 2017. “As a tool of national trade policy, tariffs had long been fading into history, a relic of 19th and early 20th centuries that most experts regarded as mutually harmful to all nations involved,” added CBS News in 2018. “Put simply, these tariffs are bad for the country, bad for the markets, and bad for Trump,” asserted columnist Douglas Schoen.

That China has been engaged in a trade war with America since the 1980s? That “mutual harm” is utterly belied by our massive trade deficit? That millions of American have been downsized out of jobs while a select few made more money than any other group of elitists in the history of the word? That China steals more than $200 billion of tech and business secrets per year, has devastated America’s domestic steel industry with dumping, sold us toxic foodstuffs and drywall as well as toys coated with lead paint? That our current dependency on it for life-saving drugs borders on catastrophic?

All apparently irrelevant — according to the “experts.”

Moreover, in 2016, when Trump asserted that China was “raping our nation,” what was CNN’s chief concern? “Sunday marks the first time in this campaign that Trump has used the term ‘rape’ to refer to what he views as China’s dominance in trade with the U.S.,” columnist Jeremy Diamond lamented. Diamond actually tied that statement to “remarks he made about Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton that critics are calling sexist and for touting the endorsement of boxer Mike Tyson, who was convicted of rape in Indiana.”

And now that China has precipitated what is arguably the biggest domestic crisis America has ever endured? The globalists and their media apparatchiks, useful idiots of the rankest kind, will side with our enemy.

“Experts” — one and all.