Back in the White House for the first 100 days, President Donald Trump has more than doubled down on his maverick-ness. He’s gone exponential. People think they’ve grown accustomed to his unpredictability but they keep being taken aback by the dizzying pace of his one move after another. A couple of highlights (or lowlights) have been:
- the tariff war he declared on April 2 – a day he dubbed America’s “Liberation Day” when he declared a trade war on virtually the rest of the world;
- The time, a week after a defiant China’s swift tit-for-tat moves had been made, when he went on social media and announced a 90-day moratorium of the tariff impositions, except on China, his hand being forced by crumbling stock market and – more compellingly – a cracking treasury bond market.
China’s hardening, meanwhile, keeps taking Washington by surprise. Late last week, the Chinese government’s spokesperson contradicted outright Trump’s dramatic claims that China was in talks with his administration about their tariff disputes between them and even that Chinese President Xi Jinping “has called” him. Beijing dismissed Trump’s claims as “fake news.”
“China refuses to take the bait,” as the New York Times plainly put it on Friday.
The trouble now is that, thanks to Trump’s crude statecraft, his administration is placed in an impossible dilemma. That it’s not going to win the trade war of epic scale with China is becoming obvious, as the government bond market vulnerability that is America’s Achilles Heel was laid bare to the world and as, to cite Adam Posen of Peterson Institute, China has the “escalation dominance.”
On the other hand, there can be no climbdown for the Trump administration without devastating dents being dealt to its creditability and the United States’ prestige as the world’s sitting superpower.
For China’s part, the Rubicon has been crossed and no sporadic and impromptu gesture of softening by Trump will likely change that, certainly not his wide-of-the-mark and counterfactual statements as mentioned above.
How the vibe has shifted in the bilateral relationship! It was in a bygone age when Beijing actively cooperated with Washington to buttress the world’s financial order in the wake of the 2008 Wall Street Crisis.
China proceeded to retire its underdog cosplay after the first Trump administration launched a tariff war against it in 2018.
Recall Xi’s face-to-face admonition to the outgoing US President Joe Biden of regarding China’s “four red lines” during their meeting in Lima, Peru, last November. Everyone knew his words were meant for Trump, who was by then the president-elect.
This was followed in late December by a broad daylight view of China’s 6th generation fighter jet flying in the sky, signaling the Chinese ability not only to catch up with but supersede the Americans in military technologies – and again, in late January, by China’s large language model DeepSeek wreaking havoc on the Wall Street.
In early March, one’s eyebrows were raised by the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson’s unprecedentedly belligerent rhetoric that ”if war is what the US wants, be it a tariff war, a trade war or any other type of war, we’re ready to fight till the end.” The Chinese embassy in Washington reposted the line on X the day after, as if for fear that the world would miss Beijing’s staunch position notice.
Trump administration accelerationism
Make no mistake about it, however: Filling the first 100 days of Trump 2.0 have not been random waves of craziness as some might infer from Trump’s characteristically fluid speech acts. Instead, the administration has been under calculated influence of a group of like-minded techno-capitalist elites who indoctrinate the second Trump administration with an accelerationist philosophy according to which a uniquely Trumpian political genre is being exhibited.
Accelerationism in this sense was promoted by Nick Land, an academic turned techno-futurist, who argued for capitalism and technology being seen as forces that should be accelerated for a hyper-capitalist and AI-driven future – a grand tendency embracing technological singularity and market-driven chaos as inevitable. He saw liberal democracy and humanistic values as obstacles to this techno-evolutionary leap.
Through Curtis Yarvin, an erstwhile Silicon Valley whiz-kid who co-founded the Dark Enlightenment with Land and emphasized dismantling democratic institutions to enable a technocratic, executive-dominated government model, Land’s accelerationism gained traction among such now-well-known figures as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, David Sachs, Alex Karp and JD Vance, all members of a close-knit techno-capital cabal around Trump.
Philosophy was turned into policies as purging bureaucracy and consolidating executive power to facilitate tech-driven statecraft and to foster global competition against China.
As a result, Trump’s current tariff warfare aims to accelerate America’s re-industrialization and the arrest of China’s ascendancy. The logic is: Disrupt global trade norms to force rapid adaptation, both domestic and international, even at the cost of short-term tumult.
All fine, except that politics is human business, not AI- or algo-driven – at least not yet. Trump the maverick and his retinue of likewise maverick aides sharing with him self-conceit and adamancy of matching scale seem to be doing a disservice to their accelerationist career, as the ramifications of Trump’s increasingly shaky tariff war against China show.
China is digging in its heels, the world is watching and weighing – and market jitters keep capital on its toes.
A far graver danger for now, therefore, is brinkmanship, a temptation that could be tantalizingly hovering around Trump’s mind: Continuing to act on the accelerationist doctrine, he could opt for further bravado desperately meant to cut a deal on his terms – say inthe Taiwan Strait or in the South China Sea, or by confiscation of China-held Treasury Bonds and/or other Chinese assets Uncle Sam can lay his hands on.
Things of this kind were actually rehearsed with Trump’s moves of despair toward the end of his first term to save the day, such as nearly sending the US Ambassador to the UN Kelly Craft to Taiwan to deliberately provoke Beijing and boost his domestic standing days before he left the White House in January 2021.
The development of affairs in that period of time was so precarious that General Mark Milley, then chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, had to take initiatives without President Trump’s directions and call his Chinese counterpart in Beijing to defuse a potentially explosive situation.
The problem is that, this time around, King Trump has surrounded himself with a cavalcade of accelerationist yes-men, newly appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine included.
That’s what the world has to watch out for upon the 100th day of Trump 2.0.
Terry Su is president of Lulu Derivation Data Ltd, a Hong Kong-based online publishing house and think tank specializing in geopolitics.
