United States president Donald Trump appears to have tried to get back to making America great again, rather than saving jobs in China, with a new Tweet about Chinese network kit-maker ZTE.

Trump yesterday Tweeted that the US Commerce Department’s recent imposition of penalties on ZTE meant “Too many jobs in China lost” and that he and Chinese president Xi Jinping were “working together to give massive Chinese phone company, ZTE, a way to get back into business, fast.”

Which didn’t go down well for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, US intelligence agencies aren’t keen on ZTE. As Republican senator Marco Rubio wrote … 

No deal has been done and Rubio does not appear to have sung the praises of anything, instead Tweeting “I hope this isn’t the beginning of backing down to China. While Chinese companies have unrestricted access to U.S. market & protection of our laws many U.S. companies have been ruined after #China blocked market access or stole their intellectual property”

The other problem Trump’s Tweet created was that he campaigned on restoring American jobs, not Chinese jobs. Hence this new Tweet on Monday.

By mentioning US companies, Trump’s telling US voters why he cares about ZTE’s fate. And by mentioning president Xi he re-enforces his claim he’s a master negotiator.

The Register has encountered two schools of thought on this incident. One suggests that policy-by-Tweet has seen Trump blunder into a mess that will see him give China concessions it doesn’t deserve for a company it uses as an espionage tool in order to secure his relationship with president Xi. The other suggests that Trump and Xi will use find a way to keep ZTE afloat, both claim a win, promote themselves as statesmen and use the deal as a bridge to consider other aspects of the US/China trade spat.

ZTE, meanwhile, is in the odd position of having the two most powerful leaders in the world debate its fate. ®

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/15/trump_zte_tweet_2/