Now, within that length of time, he apparently was spurred by questions to switch subjects, and so it could be that he sees the two topics as being pretty much unrelated. Perhaps he'd even forgotten about the squeeze-China-if-it-doesn't-do-what-what-we-want-trade-wise talk. I have no great faith in his attention span. Then again, maybe he saw it as his opportunity to tie the two together, to construct a quid pro quo arrangement, much like many perceive he was doing in the Zelensky phone conversation.Trump at 10:37:24 a.m., talking about trade negotiations: "I have a lot of options on China, but if they don't do what we want, we have tremendous power." Trump at 10:37:54 a.m., asked about Ukraine probe: "Likewise, China should start an investigation into the Bidens."
Allow me to offer another possibility: He was just winging it, just shooting off his mouth. He just gets off on tough-negotiator talk and is incapable of considering that any feathers he might ruffle disincline others from conducting business with him.
In other words, it's usually a safe course of action not to read too much into his utterances. They fly out of his mouth - or off the keypad of his phone - and he has an entirely different way of looking at it by the time the media and social media are talking about it.
No comments:
Post a Comment