Misdirection as his real goal is fucking China bigly. As to whether he succeeds a different story.
As to if he should even try fuck China that is hard to answer . I certainly do not have the info we need.
China caused it because only 10% was imposed on them before it was increased to 20%, 54%, 104%, 145% and now 245%. This is because China is retaliating. Why retaliating when the trade deficit for US is so huge. The world needs to be careful of China because I do not see any problem if 10% is imposed on them by United States with such huge trade deficit.
Chinese bonds in US is the second largest while Japan has the largest. But if compared to the rest of the world, China bonds is still not much of significant amount but which is enough to affect United States if China decide to sell them. This may decrease the price of dollar but also increase the price of yaun which will still further lead to the purpose of this tariff. If China reduced the price of yuan, this is making their economy more competitive and also encouraging exports but if the bonds is sold and cause increase in price of yaun, export in China to US will be discouraged with it.
US will also suffer this because they are planning what could lead to inflation in the country. But if smartphones, memory cards, semiconductor devices, solar cells, modems, routers and flat panel displays are exempted from the tariffs, let us see how it would be.
And who will China be able to sell American treasuries
bonds to? It seems to me that it has so many of them that it simply will not find buyers for them.
It is unlikely that such buyers will be European investors, or, for example, investors from India. At the same time, for example, the United States itself may refuse to buy treasury bonds from China, citing political reasons. Of course, China can sell some of the American government bonds little by little, but it will not be able to sell them all at once...
In general, in this situation, both the United States and China are positioning themselves as countries not interested in free trade and fair competition. At the same time, China demonstratively refuses to make concessions, which shows the whole world the weakness of the US president and his team. And this is surprising.
Firstly, it is unclear why Donald Trump declared a trade war without calculating all the consequences of this war. It seems that the reaction of China and other countries came as a surprise to him and he does not have a backup plan for this case.
It is also not very clear what China will do if it loses such a large market as the US. China has production capacities that can only be used to produce goods for export. The situation will be even more complicated for it if the European Union (which is also interested in protecting its producers) introduces protective duties following the US.
As a result, there is much less trust and much less stability in the world.