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Comment by lateforwork | Hacker News Reader

China is outsmarting the current administration in every way, see here:

"From Chips to Security, China Is Getting Much of What It Wants From the U.S." https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/12/world/asia/nvidia-china-t...

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As long as Trump and his friends get rich off it, I'm not sure anyone's being outsmarted, they are arriving at mutually beneficial outcomes.

I'm not sure how much is outsmarting, as much as it is that the Trump administration is happy to make a big show and then sell out the US as long as he and his cronies get their cut.

Hard to call it outsmarting when your opponent is a toddler

And inexpen$ive for other governments to lease

For chips, Trump literally said "we need to get our cut".

Well, Trump is a showman after all.

Not long into Trump's second term I read that senior Chinese officials were calling him Orange Santa. I hope it's true.

I’m pretty sure everyone who sees him for what he is has called him worse.

Christmas has been coming early for China ever since the invasion of Iraq.

> I hope it's true.

Why?

It's funny and whatever they call him, it's still true that Trump has been wonderful for China.

To each their own. I hope that it he has not been wonderful for china.

Hope won't decide whether or not China prospers. Strategic consistency will.

Hope doesn't come into it. It's just a fact. And if you accept it as a fact, then hoping they have a silly name for him isn't the same as hoping Trump's been good for China. Like I say, it's not a question, of course he has been.

“Orange santa” in Chinese would be pretty unwieldy as a nickname. “橙黄圣诞老人” is 6 syllables.

But there has been a meme in China for ages that Trump is secretly a Chinese guy named “Chuan Jianguo” (Jianguo means “building the nation”) who was sent by China to destroy America from within.

There was a good tweet after election day where someone wrote that a Chinese classmate was talking about their religious father in Beijing, who thought that Trump was chosen by God to win the election -- but only as part of a larger divine plan to destroy America. Pretty funny, to be honest.

Agent Krasnov, now this, there seems to be competition for whom that guy is fucking up US more.

Although answer is probably simplest - for himself and his ego.

I cant imagine the mental gymnastic any half decent republican must be going through daily to keep avoiding utter debiliating shame for voting him when doing the proverbial look in the mirror.

There's an irony about the media (including the Times) screaming about Trump trying to fight China economically, and then the Times comes out with a piece about how China is getting everything they want from him?

Makes you wonder what side the Times is really on here.

It seems pretty clear.

I don’t see how there is any cognitive dissonance there. Trump can simultaneously do disastrous things for our economy in terms of global trade with China as well as allow for us to be routed by Chinese strategists.

The Times is on the side of "reporting things that people say."

Can you be clearer about The Times screaming about Trump trying to fight China economically? What are you referring to specifically from them?

All journalist organizations, unfortunately, have an incentive to bias content towards maximum clickbait. The ones that don't end up being outcompeted.

This is not true. You just need to read the business papers, as they have incentives to be accurate. I like the FT, but apparently the non opinion WSJ is ok.

There's an irony to treating the media as a monolithic entity when it is comprised of hundreds of publications and studios and tens of thousands of employees.

Non-techies don't conflate Apple with Netflix. Why do techies consistently conflate the NYT with Newsnation?

I think the keyphrase is the "trying" in "trying to fight China economically". The current administration simply does not have any incentives, well of resources or intellectual capacity to pursue any long-term growth goals.

It's a garage fire-sale and China has just to sit there and wait.

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