Commentary by Stephen Macaulay

If you can’t believe the White House, who can you believe, right?

So maybe little girls will have a few more Barbies than were in their future before Monday. 

The president, as a somewhat Scrooge-like grandpa, said last week; “I don't think that a beautiful baby girl that's 11 years old needs to have 30 dolls. I think they can have three dolls or four dolls because what we were doing with China was just unbelievable. We had a trade deficit of hundreds of billions of dollars with China.”

I don’t think a whole lot of sixth-graders are all that concerned with trade deficits. The sizes of their allowances, perhaps, but not Sino-American relations.

But things must be better.

That’s because the headline on a piece published Sunday on the official White House website reads:

“US Announces China Trade Deal in Geneva”

Huzzah! Pencils for everyone!

But here’s the thing.

Most of the people who write articles for the Fake Media went to journalism school. 

One of the things they learned was how to write a lede.

A lede generally contains the Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How.

Read that and you get the gist of the thing.

Of course, you can’t believe any of that.

Or, as Donald Trump put it in a speech in 2018:

“Just remember, what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what's happening. Just stick with us, don't believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news."

But what’s the deal with China?

Well, that’s not clear, headline notwithstanding.

The announcement consists of two quotes. One is from Scott Bessent. The other US Trade Representative Ambassador Jamieson Greer.

No ledes, presumably because that’s the approach of the “dishonest,” “corrupt” and “crazed lunatics” that are generally considered the press corps.

Rather, just the facts. Except there are none.

Bessent’s quote opens: “I’m happy to report that we made substantial progress between the United States and China in the very important trade talks.”

Umm. . .isn’t “substantial progress” a little shy of a “Trade Deal”?

Bessent went on to say, “I can tell you that the talks were very productive.”

Again, where’s the deal?

However, Greer said, “It’s important to understand how quickly we were able to come to an agreement” and that “were confident that the deal we struck with our Chinese partners will help us to work toward that national emergency.”

“National emergency?” you wonder. That’s the “massive $1.2 trillion trade deficit” that Greer mentions. “What about the ‘hundreds of billions’ that Trump mentioned?” you wonder. Well, he was just describing the gist of things.

C’mon. He’s a busy man. You don’t want him to get all bolloxed up in the numbers. He has people for that.

Perhaps by the time you’ve read this the Agreement will be explained and the reason there wasn’t any more clarity in the White House piece was because it came out on a Sunday and people had clocked off for the weekend.

Those golf games aren’t going to play themselves.

Addendum

There was good news on the US-China trade front announced Monday:

“We have reached an agreement on a 90-day pause and substantially move down the tariff levels. Both sides on the reciprocal tariffs will move their tariffs down 115%,” US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a news conference.

Again: is a “pause” a “deal”?

In the joint statement released by the two government it says: “After taking the aforementioned actions,” — the rate reductions — "the Parties will establish a mechanism to continue discussions about economic and trade relations.”

Which essentially says things are still in play. 

In other words, this is not a “done deal.”

Macaulay is pundit-at-large for The Hustings.