Yep -Pres Trump is back tracking on that one too - hopefully sense prevailing.
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President Trump vows to make ‘fair deal’ with China
President Donald Trump spoke to reporters outside of the White House on Wednesday. Trump said if China does not agree to a deal on trade, the U.S. will set the terms.
Trump told reporters in DC: “We’re gong to have a fair deal with China. We’re going to have a country that you can be proud of- not a laughing stock all over the world.”
Trump added he has no plans to fire the central bank chief and also signaled progress with China on the tariff front on Wednesday.
Bessent is an ex-hedge fund guy, who was mentored by Soros. Kinda funny actually the connection.
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So I think he’s listening to the news about the country.
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Maybe listened to what the ceo’s of Walmart, Target & home depot had to say on their meet with him on Monday past.
Likely supply chain issues & price rises got a mention - the spectre of empty shelves & crazy prices?
It appears that China is not conceding anything at this point, but rather highlighting Trump’s absurdities.
China rejected US trade overtures Thursday, demanding all tariffs be lifted and denying any progress in talks. “The US should… thoroughly remove all unilateral tariffs… if it really wants to solve the problem,” said Commerce Ministry spokesman He Yadong, calling reports of ongoing negotiations “groundless.”
Separately, China’s central bank governor Pan Gongsheng warned that global tensions could lead to “high friction, low trust,” urging stronger international cooperation as US-China talks remain stalled despite Trump’s softer rhetoric on tariffs.
Most Americans are shopping in one or all of those places. So if shelves go empty, the country will hear and see about it immediately.
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Meanwhile German shipper Hapag-Lloyd report that 30% of it’s China-US shipping has been cancelled.
Likewise Freightwaves who collect freight data are reporting overall decline of 15% with that number increasing.
Freight is of course a leading indicator of commercial activity in general.
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Trump has indeed lost his advantage and credibility, and now he’s the laughingstock on the world stage.
President Donald Trump, in a wide-ranging interview with Time magazine published Friday, claimed he’s already “made 200 deals” on tariffs and said he’s spoken with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
In the cover story, in which Trump’s discussed his first 100 days in office, the president was asked about White House trade adviser Peter Navarro’s prediction of “90 deals in 90 days.”
“I’ve made 200 deals,” Trump said. When asked to confirm that number, Trump said “100%.”
Trump, though, would not elaborate on what countries he’s solidified deals with or the terms. There are 195 countries in the world, and yet Trump is claiming to have made more trade deals than that. He’s met with various foreign officials at the White House in recent weeks on tariffs and other economic issues, but had not yet announced any agreements.
“I would say, over the next three to four weeks, and we’re finished, by the way,” Trump told Time. “We’ll be finished.”
On the issue of China – which faces the highest tariff rate from the administration – Trump said President Xi has called him.
“He’s called. And I don’t think that’s a sign of weakness on his behalf,” Trump said.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun on Thursday called the administration’s claims active discussions were happening “fake news.” On Friday, the Jiakun said “China and the United States have not consulted or negotiated on the tariff issue” and “the United States should not confuse the public.”
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Given the volume of information / Data Elon has acquired into his possession, it seems that he and maybe Trump had nefarious plans from the beginning, things will only get worse.
Whistleblower: DOGE Siphoned NLRB Case Data
A security architect with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) alleges that employees from Elon Musk‘s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) transferred gigabytes of sensitive data from agency case files in early March, using short-lived accounts configured to leave few traces of network activity. The NLRB whistleblower said the unusual large data outflows coincided with multiple blocked login attempts from an Internet address in Russia that tried to use valid credentials for a newly-created DOGE user account.
The allegations came in an April 14 letter to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, signed by Daniel J. Berulis, a 38-year-old security architect at the NLRB.
NPR, which was the first to report on Berulis’s whistleblower complaint, says NLRB is a small, independent federal agency that investigates and adjudicates complaints about unfair labor practices, and stores “reams of potentially sensitive data, from confidential information about employees who want to form unions to proprietary business information.”
The complaint documents a one-month period beginning March 3, during which DOGE officials reportedly demanded the creation of all-powerful “tenant admin” accounts in NLRB systems that were to be exempted from network logging activity that would otherwise keep a detailed record of all actions taken by those accounts.
Berulis said the new DOGE accounts had unrestricted permission to read, copy, and alter information contained in NLRB databases. The new accounts also could restrict log visibility, delay retention, route logs elsewhere, or even remove them entirely — top-tier user privileges that neither Berulis nor his boss possessed.
Berulis writes that on March 3, a black SUV accompanied by a police escort arrived at his building — the NLRB headquarters in Southeast Washington, D.C. The DOGE staffers did not speak with Berulis or anyone else in NLRB’s IT staff, but instead met with the agency leadership.
“Our acting chief information officer told us not to adhere to standard operating procedure with the DOGE account creation, and there was to be no logs or records made of the accounts created for DOGE employees, who required the highest level of access,” Berulis wrote of their instructions after that meeting.
“We have built in roles that auditors can use and have used extensively in the past but would not give the ability to make changes or access subsystems without approval,” he continued. “The suggestion that they use these accounts was not open to discussion.”
Berulis found that on March 3 one of the DOGE accounts created an opaque, virtual environment known as a “container,” which can be used to build and run programs or scripts without revealing its activities to the rest of the world. Berulis said the container caught his attention because he polled his colleagues and found none of them had ever used containers within the NLRB network.
Berulis said he also noticed that early the next morning — between approximately 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. EST on Tuesday, March 4 — there was a large increase in outgoing traffic from the agency. He said it took several days of investigating with his colleagues to determine that one of the new accounts had transferred approximately 10 gigabytes worth of data from the NLRB’s NxGen case management system.
Berulis said neither he nor his co-workers had the necessary network access rights to review which files were touched or transferred — or even where they went. But his complaint notes the NxGen database contains sensitive information on unions, ongoing legal cases, and corporate secrets.
“I also don’t know if the data was only 10gb in total or whether or not they were consolidated and compressed prior,” Berulis told the senators. “This opens up the possibility that even more data was exfiltrated. Regardless, that kind of spike is extremely unusual because data almost never directly leaves NLRB’s databases.”
Berulis said he and his colleagues grew even more alarmed when they noticed nearly two dozen login attempts from a Russian Internet address (83.149.30,186) that presented valid login credentials for a DOGE employee account — one that had been created just minutes earlier. Berulis said those attempts were all blocked thanks to rules in place that prohibit logins from non-U.S. locations.
“Whoever was attempting to log in was using one of the newly created accounts that were used in the other DOGE related activities and it appeared they had the correct username and password due to the authentication flow only stopping them due to our no-out-of-country logins policy activating,” Berulis wrote. “There were more than 20 such attempts, and what is particularly concerning is that many of these login attempts occurred within 15 minutes of the accounts being created by DOGE engineers.”
According to Berulis, the naming structure of one Microsoft user account connected to the suspicious activity suggested it had been created and later deleted for DOGE use in the NLRB’s cloud systems: “[email protected].” He also found other new Microsoft cloud administrator accounts with nonstandard usernames, including “Whitesox, Chicago M.” and “Dancehall, Jamaica R.”
A screenshot shared by Berulis showing the suspicious user accounts.
On March 5, Berulis documented that a large section of logs for recently created network resources were missing, and a network watcher in Microsoft Azure was set to the “off” state, meaning it was no longer collecting and recording data like it should have.
Berulis said he discovered someone had downloaded three external code libraries from GitHub that neither NLRB nor its contractors ever use. A “readme” file in one of the code bundles explained it was created to rotate connections through a large pool of cloud Internet addresses that serve “as a proxy to generate pseudo-infinite IPs for web scraping and brute forcing.” Brute force attacks involve automated login attempts that try many credential combinations in rapid sequence.
The complaint alleges that by March 17 it became clear the NLRB no longer had the resources or network access needed to fully investigate the odd activity from the DOGE accounts, and that on March 24, the agency’s associate chief information officer had agreed the matter should be reported to US-CERT. Operated by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), US-CERT provides on-site cyber incident response capabilities to federal and state agencies.
But Berulis said that between April 3 and 4, he and the associate CIO were informed that “instructions had come down to drop the US-CERT reporting and investigation and we were directed not to move forward or create an official report.” Berulis said it was at this point he decided to go public with his findings.
Continues 
“We are under assault right now”
For cybersecurity experts, that spike in data leaving the system is a key indicator of a breach, Berulis explained.
“We are under assault right now,” he remembered thinking.
Whistleblower: DOGE Siphoned NLRB Case Data – Krebs on Security
At some point, China and the U. S. will need to communicate regardless of who initiates the call; eventually, that phone must be answered.
While the Swiss president was in Washington last week to lobby U.S. officials over President Donald Trump’s threatened 31% tariff on Swiss goods, the Swiss foreign minister was in Beijing, expressing his nation’s willingness to strengthen cooperation with China and upgrade a free trade agreement.
As Trump’s trade war locks the world’s two largest economies on a collision course, America’s unnerved allies and partners are cozying up with China to hedge their bets. It comes as Trump’s trade push upends a decade of American foreign policy — including his own from his first term — toward rallying the rest of the world to join the United States against China. And it threatens to hand Beijing more leverage in any eventual dialogue with the U.S. administration.
With Trump saying that countries are “kissing my ass” to negotiate trade deals on his terms or risk stiff import taxes, Beijing is reaching out to countries far and near. It portrays itself as a stabilizing force and a predictable trading partner, both to cushion the impact from Trump’s tariffs and to forge stronger trade ties outside of the U.S. market.
“America and China are now locked in a fierce contest for global supremacy,” Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong said in an April 16 speech. “Both powers claim they do not wish to force countries to choose sides. But in reality, each seeks to draw others closer into their respective orbits.”
The tariffs on Chinese goods are off the charts
Trump has paused some of his steepest tariffs on most American partners for 90 days after global financial markets melted down. But he has raised tariffs on Chinese goods to 145%, drawing rebukes from Beijing, which has vowed to "fight to the end.” U.S. companies are warning of higher prices, meaning Trump could face both higher inflation and empty store shelves.
The magnitude of the taxes are already dramatically affecting American imports, with the shipping containers set to arrive at the Port of Los Angeles down nearly 36% over the past two weeks, according to Port Optimizer, which tracks vessels. It’s lending urgency for both the U.S. and China to bolster support from alternate partners.
While Trump administration officials suggest the president could ease the duty rates on Chinese goods at his discretion, there has been no indication he’s yet looking for a reduction. That, after all, could suggest his protectionist policies were hurting the American economy.
“They want to make a deal obviously," Trump told reporters Sunday, saying the U.S. had gone “cold turkey” on trade from China. “Right now, they’re not doing business with us.”
The White House has framed any negotiations as being between the U.S. president and Chinese President Xi Jinping, but neither leader seems willing to make the initial outreach without some kind of concession. The two countries can’t even agree publicly whether they are holding talks.
Earlier this month, Xi — on his first foreign trip this year — visited Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia, resulting in mutual pledges for closer economic and trade ties. In Vietnam, which faces the 46% tariff from the U.S., Beijing and Hanoi agreed to strengthen industrial and supply chain cooperation. In Malaysia and Cambodia, Xi secured similar agreements. Cambodia is faced with a 49% tariff from the U.S., and Malaysia 24%.
Then there’s Japan: Despite its long-standing enmity towards the nation that once colonized parts of it, the Chinese government has reached out to Tokyo and urged a coordinated response, according to Kyodo News.
China is digging in
China is ready to use the stick, too. A South Korean newspaper has reported that China is demanding South Korean businesses not to ship goods containing China’s rare earth minerals to U.S. defense companies or face likely sanctions.
Earlier this month, Beijing warned that no country should reach a deal with the U.S. at China’s expense and vowed to take countermeasures in a “resolute and reciprocal manner” should such a situation arise.
Hal Brands, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, said China will “try to exploit Trump’s abrasive behavior to make inroads with U.S. allies and countries in the Global South.”
Some scholars say Beijing is already gaining. “People lost the confidence, or even trust, for the United States, particularly for Donald Trump in the U.S. Not for China,” said Li Cheng, professor of political science at the University of Hong Kong. “So in that regard, China gains in the geopolitical landscape.”
In the latest Ipsos poll, for the first time, more people globally now say China has a positive impact on the world than the United States. The pollster cited the broad backlash to Trump’s tariffs.
Countries have to choose, but it’s difficult
China is the world’s largest exporter and the U.S. the largest importer. Total trade for China reached a record 43.85 trillion yuan (US$6 trillion) in 2024, and the country is the biggest trading partner for most of the world, including the European Union, Japan, South Korea and the grouping of the 10 Southeast Asian countries known as ASEAN.
In Europe, China is preparing to lift sanctions to revive a trade deal, according to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post. Chinese state media have been calling on European leaders to join China in safeguarding the multilateralism.