Tariff man desperate for virus fix

Is Donald Trump suffering from a victim complex? It's plausible. Otherwise, he wouldn't have perceived himself as a victim of the "fake" US media that has been hostile to him.

Now, the US president is also crafting a description for Americans that they're victims of a pandemic for which Beijing must be held responsible after more American lives were lost than during the Vietnam War.

If people suffering from a victim mindset tend to be vengeful, then Trump is indeed vengeful, vowing to retaliate with more tariffs on Chinese goods.

By now, the phase-one trade agreement committing China to buy US products worth hundreds of billions of dollars more has been swiftly kicked to the side. Either Trump is no longer hopeful Beijing will honor the deal or he has a greater need than having Beijing buy from US farmers.

On the table is a confusing strategy, and Trump is confusing his listeners.

Whether trade tariffs are set at 25 percent or more, they are only the means to achieve an objective rather than being an objective themselves, bearing in mind that nobody increases tariffs just for the sake of doing so.

When Trump escalated the trade war with China in 2019, it had been his declared target to end trade deficits through tariffs. However, as he vowed to punish the Chinese government with a new round of tariffs for "covering up" coronavirus outbreaks in the mainland before it turned into a global pandemic, there was one thing glaringly missing in the threat: an objective.

What is Trump actually after with new tariffs? In the end, it all boils down to the November presidential election.

By putting the Chinese government in the crosshairs, Trump hopes that the blame game will energize his election campaign in time for the vote and rally a divided nation around him in the face of an external enemy. It's a common trick to divert attention elsewhere whenever an incumbent is in trouble.

With unemployment shooting up amid the pandemic, Trump has effectively lost the economic card and must move fast to substitute it with a different rallying call.

Although Trump and Secretary of State Michael Pompeo were only a step short of accusing Beijing of artificially creating the novel coronavirus, the tactical shift of the president's ruling team was clear as both men expressed the belief that the virus was leaked by a Wuhan laboratory which is known to have collected vast samples of bat viruses for research over the years.

The claim of evidence in a Five Eyes intelligence report that the virus was leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology was more than a coincidence.

It's likely that, as the US lifts lockdown to kick start the economic, the blame game will accelerate and so will the trade war. As both China and the US emerge weakened from the pandemic, the question is: which one is weakened more?

Yesterday's slump of over 1,000 points on the Hang Seng Index put Hong Kong among the worst-performing bourses in the region.

Still reeling from anti-government protests and the pandemic, escalation in Sino-US trade conflicts is the last thing the SAR needs.