announcement? announcement? china said they would also impose tariffs. paul: you worked in kong and you know in covering china that they discriminate against foreign firms. is there a point, unlike maybe with steel tariffs, that trump is actually seriously addressing, a real problem with china? did china commit, quote, unquote economic aggression? the answer is yes, they do. they steal intellectual property. they get subdisieche subsidizedm state opened banks. you want to put in place a system that doesn t harm american businesses and american consumers and to be frank, that s a difficult challenge. how do you punish a country that s such a large part of global trade without also punishing american consumers at the same time?
then he goes to the united states and says i can help you solve your problem, just happens to be the problem that i created. so i think trump has some idea about putin that s not grounded in reality. very similar to the reset idea. paul: obama s reset. obama s reset. i m more interested in the policy. there s a lot more i would like to see president trump do vis-a-vis putin. i don t think john bolton has any scales on his eyes about russia and so forth. i m more interested in what the policy direction will be. paul: when loo you look at te policy record on russia in the first year of the trump administration, it s tougher than obama s. there s lethal weapons sales to ukraine. the statement last week from the white house joining the leaders of europe in condemning the chemical attack in london. but there is this issue people raise which is why can t donald trump himself seem to say a
putin and congratulated him on the victory, his electoral victory. we had a very good call and i suspect that we ll probably be meeting in the not too distant future to discuss the arms race and also to discuss ukraine and syria and north korea and various other things. paul: president trump facing blow-back for his call this week to russian president vladimir putin. the president consisten congratd putin for his victory in last sunday s election despite the national security advisors reportedly instructing him not to do so. trump defended the call. he said he called president putin to congratulate him on his victory. in the past obama called him also. the fake news media said this was a bad thing. thewe re back with dan henniger, mary kissel and bill mcgurn.
american dental association for its effectiveness and safety. my mouth feels so clean. i ll only use an oral-b. oral-b. brush like a pro. paul: facebook under fire this week after revelations that more than 50 million user profiles were harvested by a data analysis firm employed by president trump s 2016 campaign. ceo mark zuckerberg broke his
rubbed the president the wrong way and even there s reports general mattis and so forth. so clearly there s a comfort level here and it s interesting that president trump would pick mike pompeo who is the one that warned us about north korea, said within months they ll have this capacity to strike us with a nuclear weapon and john bolton who has more hawkish views on this as well. paul: what do you think about the implications of this for policy? one of the implications i would suggest is that john bolton is going to say, as he has written for us many times, mr. physical therapy i thin bepresident i th- mr. president i think you should pull out of completely of the iran agreement, for example. that is up in may. i think the expectation is the president will not renew the iran nuclear deal in may. as bill was suggesting, mike pompeo was a primary congressional critic of that deal when he was in the house of representatives. and i think you can probably see pompeo and john bolton now