JD Vance’s superb performance against Tim Walz stands as yet another major blow to the aspirations of the Harris/Walz ticket and their allies in the regime media. Though surely Walz’ bizarre claim to have befriended school shooters will survive as the most memorable line, it is worth noting just how refreshingly substantive JD’s remarks were throughout. Though JD did an excellent job presenting Trump as the peace candidate, his most noteworthy thematic emphasis centered on the importance of manufacturing to the Trump/Vance policy agenda—at least four times he brought the conversation back to the critical importance of manufacturing.

Manufacturing has now become one of the central issues of this election cycle, with both presidential campaigns trying to one up the other in the battle over who will deliver for forgotten American workers. Last week, Vice President Harris’s desperate lies about Trump’s manufacturing record were so blatant that even CNN had to factcheck her.:

From the beginning of his presidency in January 2017 through February 2020, just before the pandemic crash, the economy added 414,000 manufacturing jobs.

Trump has reinforced the importance of manufacturing with a strong defense of his tariff policy, which was once maligned by establishment Democrats and Republicans alike but has proven so effective that even the Biden-Harris administration has opted to keep Trump’s China tariffs in place. Similarly, Trump has displayed his commitment to manufacturing with his pledge to build on the success of his earlier tax plan and further reduce the corporate tax rate for companies pledging to reshore manufacturing in America.

Months ago, Revolver published a guest post highlighting Trump’s most ambitious manufacturing agenda yet: to not just incentivize American companies to bring their jobs back to America, but to entice foreign companies to set up shop in the United States and give their jobs to Americans as well. Ever the master negotiator and always on the offensive, Trump understands that it’s not just enough to get American companies to bring back American jobs from China. In other words, Trump now promises that instead of shipping jobs to China, he can get China to ship their jobs to us.

Last Tuesday, the former President unveiled his plans for “New American Industrialism” and doubled down on this bold approach to thousands of his supporters at a rally in Savannah, Georgia. “We will take other countries’ jobs. We’re going to take their factories,” Trump said to raucous cheers. To signify just how serious he is about this policy, Trump said he will appoint a “manufacturing ambassador,” whose sole job it will be to attract foreign-owned companies to the United States, specifically targeting China. This is a brilliant expansion and intensification of Trump’s trade policy that the rest of the GOP should waste no time in getting behind.

Unfortunately, many in the establishment GOP are allowing a misguided and reflexively hostile attitude toward China to get in the way of one of Trump’s boldest strategies to outcompete China economically and, most importantly, create jobs for Americans. For example, last year Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin rejected a Ford manufacturing plant that would’ve created 2,500 American jobs in the poorest part of Virginia because Ford was partnering with a company, Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. (CATL), that has ties to China. Also last year, a corn mill being built by Fufeng USA in Grand Forks, North Dakota, that would’ve created 1,200 jobs was blocked by Governor Doug Burgum because the parent company, Fufeng Group, was based in China. Perhaps the most egregious example is Gotion Inc., a northern California battery manufacturing company that is building two plants in the rust belt that would create a total of 5,000 American jobs. Politicians in DC are engaged in a desperate gambit to block the two factories because Gotion’s parent company is based in China. Even though Gotion is the perfect example of a company doing exactly what Trump wants, establishment Republicans in DC are willing to kill the jobs in order to score political points. Of course, if there were a legitimate national security threat posed by a particular foreign company, that would be just cause to block it, but no such security threat has been established in any of the cases above and countless others.

The ringleader of the China hysteria is the new Chairman of the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, Rep. John Moolenaar. Moolenaar replaced neocon Mike Gallagher, who worked with Biden’s DOJ to ban TikTok and then resigned from Congress in a way that prevented the GOP from filling his seat. Like Gallagher, Moolenaar has never been ‘America First,’ but is per formatively employing “tough talk” on China as a way to make himself appear hardcore to the MAGA base. One glance at Moolenaar’s voting record tells you everything you need to know about how “hard-core” and discerning Moolenaar actually is when it comes to security and American interests. He voted to certify the 2020 election, to block President Trump from withdrawing troops from Syria, to overrule Trump’s veto of the military industrial complex’s NDAA, and to increase foreign worker visas. He even publicly opposed some of President Trump’s tariffs in 2018. So now the same guy who supported foreign workers taking American jobs and opposed tariffs is telling us we can’t take jobs from China. Got it.

Gallagher and many other establishment GOP operatives’ push to ban Tik Tok is perhaps the best example of the failures and missed opportunities that can arise from this fake, compensatory bravado in relation to China. As we put it in a piece opposing the Tik Tok ban:

Republicans, mindlessly seeking a big win against China and tech, now that both are popular punching bags, nearly sleepwalked into passing a disastrous law. The RESTRICT Act is a classic D.C. ploy. Savvy operators, exploiting the right’s well-intentioned desire to combat China, offered them a temporary victory to lure them into a permanent long-term calamity. 

The RESTRICT Act is bad, a disaster-in-waiting, a Patriot Act updated for Generation Z. But it’s not just a matter of Congress writing up a flawed bill. Any bill that takes out TikTok actually is going to be dangerous to American freedom an well-being. Why? Because, by its very nature, banning TikTok means increasing the power of the U.S. government, and that means giving more power to those most hostile to the American people and their freedoms.

READ MORE: While the GOP Focuses on TikTok, Google Prepares to Devour Everyone Whole

With the Tik Tok ban, many GOP officials got duped into supporting a bill that ended up massively increasing Biden’s censorship powers. Instead, Republicans could have embraced Tik Tok as a way to reach younger voters, as Trump wisely has. As it so happens, one of the most successful political Tik Tokers is Trump loyalist and former head of White House Personnel Johnny McEntee, who spreads the MAGA word to his audience of over 3 million Tik Tok followers.

Now the impotent fear mongering over China has spread to include manufacturing plants, and many in the GOP seem dead set on repudiating a bold step toward moving on the offensive on China economically and killing thousands of American jobs in the process. Trump is both a peacemaker and a dealmaker. This helps to reconcile Trump’s relentless competitiveness when it comes to securing the best trade deals with Trump’s reluctance to unnecessarily inflame foreign policy tensions by categorizing everything remotely associated with China as a national security threat. Trump has taken on the honorable but unenviable task of going after the true threat, the deep state right here in America, and thus has little need for counterproductive, performative, and compensatory posturing with respect to China, Russia, and other foreign actors. In other words, he’s America First.