Trump was playing all sides, one day he would put up tariffs and the next he would back down for pebbles back and start talking like they were God’s gift to man. He said China was great when the pandemic was already causing problems for us, and then switched to blaming them for everything (as he should have in the beginning). We needed him to do something meaningful to knock them down, but his “America First” mentality excluded cooperation with other countries to tighten the screws on them, making every step he took meaningless. The problem wasn’t the “establishment,” the problem was that he was incompetent. The TPP would have been better than what Trump tried.