“The consensus from both delegations this weekend was neither side wants a decoupling.” — Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, announcing an interim trade agreement with China

our correspondent knows a lot of other stuff is going on in the world. Big (Not So) Beautiful Bills. Oval Office food fights. Terrorism in the streets of the nation’s capital.

But indulge us in looking back to seven weeks ago when President Donald J. Trump was declaring the nation’s “economic independence” on his tariff “Liberation Day.” 

Most notably, he slammed China – not just the worst trade malefactor but also the baddest across-the-board rule-breaker on the world scene – with tariffs of up to 145% to free America and its workers from a state of affairs where “foreign leaders have stolen our jobs, foreign cheaters have ransacked our factories, and foreign scavengers have torn apart our once beautiful American dream.”

And back to three weeks ago, when 47 was doubling down in the face of Wall Street temper tantrums and inflation/supply fearmongering. He mulled that potential tariff-driven interruptions may mean that girls “have two dolls instead of 30” at Christmas and “maybe the two dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally.”

The response to that musing was especially rich, as the TDS-ravaged High Church of Radical Progressive Climate Change True Believers in particular exploded into high dudgeon. 

With socialist Bernie Sanders and x.com habitue Chris Murphy picking up on the talking-point baseline set by The Climate Cult’s High Priestess, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to fulminate how “billionaire” Trump doesn’t understand working families’ challenges. 

MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell drolly dubbing the president “Donny Two Dolls.” Fox’s token liberal Jessica Tarlov recalling The Grinch. And even the annoyingly still-omnipresent Hillary Clinton, juxtaposing consecutive weeks’ Trump tempests, snarkily querying whether “American children should make do with ‘two dolls’ while Donald Trump gets a free ‘sky palace’ from the Qatari government.”

Of course, ten minutes ago in Washington time, these sudden champions of low costs, abundant living and consumer choice were commanding you to lay down not your children’s dolls but your actual children as offerings on the altar of the climate gods. 

Not to mention your homes, car, suburban lifestyle, stoves, lightbulbs and milkshakes. And – horrors! – cheeseburgers.

In contrast, the president was not calling for permanent deprivation in response to a fabricated crisis. In keeping with wartime tradition – and make no mistake, America is in a long-term, multifront conflict with Chinese tyrants – he was requesting patience with short-term pain to produce long-term gain in a real, serious cause.

That ostensible cause: restoring the U.S. as an “industrial powerhouse” with an abundance of competitively priced, high-quality goods produced here. And equally important, reconstructing supply chains less vulnerable to Chinese Communist Party mischief.

In this commentator’s view, he was “forcing American business” – and consumers – “to come to grips with the need to kiss CCP despots goodbye.” In other words, “decoupling.”

But never mind. Turns out Team Trump was just “toying” with y’all in pursuit of a trade policy focused less on the Art of War than the Art of the Deal. 

And less on kissing the dictatorial Xi and Company goodbye than on kissing and making up – even as reports flood in of a regime on the ropes.

Yes, Secretary Bessent did nod to the need for a less “generalized” decoupling when it comes to “strategic necessities” such as steel, “critical medicines” and semiconductors.

But make no mistake: as expressed by the administration’s main money man, a goal greater than “economic independence” was preserving an alleged “shared interest” with the Chinese in“balanced trade.”

In other words, cutting a “good deal” of the type at the heart of the Trump brand.

And before, during, and after the Middle Kingdom announcement, there surely have been a flurry of them. An India-Pakistan truce. Hostage releases. Talks and calls involving Ukraine and Russia. The lifting of sanctions on Syria. A new Air Force One as a gift from Qatar’s terror-sponsoring royals – not to mention trillions of dollars of investment from them and the Saudis. 

Whatever the merits of those other agreements (and some give reason for pause), it’s difficult to countenance the term “balanced” when you’re making “good deals” with “foreign cheaters” and “scavengers.”

Villains and vultures employing slave labor and market manipulation to undercut American workers. Flooding Amazon and other platforms with counterfeit, illegal, and often dangerous goods while gaming algorithms to boost sales. Systematically looting U.S. companies’ intellectual property.

Engaging in massive cyberattacks – including hundreds of millions of denial of service attempts a day on the Pentagon – and cyberfraud, while hoovering up terabytes of data from hundreds of millions of US citizens and seeking access to private information of billions of Meta users.

Financing a massive defense buildup with U.S. consumers’ dollars, and flexing that muscle to threaten its neighbors and undermine American interests worldwide, including our own hemisphere. Enabling North Korea’s nuclear program and encouraging Iran’s – while bucking up Li’l Kim’s and Vladimir’s evil regimes. 

Using technology to track their citizens’ every move and punishing or rewarding them with a “social credit” system. While also literally bombing churches and creating modern-day concentration camps for dissidents and religious minorities – while harvesting their organs.

And a “shared interest” with power-mongers whose “all-of-nation long-term strategy” – to reiterate the Defense Department assertion your correspondent will repeat until he is blue in the fingers – seeks “Indo-Pacific regional hegemony in the near-term and displacement of the United States to achieve global preeminence in the future?” 

As if.

It seems a lesson from humankind’s earliest days in the Garden must be learned and relearned until the end of days: don’t toy with the Devil when it comes to pact-making. Because a day of reckoning must always come. And will, as the ever-patient Chinese bide their time.

And when it does, there will be no “dolling” it up.

Bob Maistros, a regular contributor to Issues & Insights, is a messaging and communications strategist, crisis specialist, and former political speechwriter. He can be reached at bob@rpmexecutive.com.

Views expressed by guest contributors to Issues & Insights are their own and don’t necessarily reflect the views of the I&I Editorial Board.