In One Sentence

• Following a hard-fought contest in key swing states, Republican candidate Donald Trump secured a resounding victory in the 2024 Presidential Election, winning 312 electoral votes to Kamala Harris’ 226.
• Susie Wiles, who was the co-chair of Trump’s election campaign in 2016 and 2024, has been appointed by Trump as his White House Chief of Staff.
• Rep. Mike Waltz, who is a Green Beret veteran, served in Afghanistan, and was a Member of the House’s Armed Services, Foreign Affairs and Intelligence committees, is to serve as the next National Security Adviser. 
• Kristi Noem, currently serving as the Governor of South Dakota, has been nominated to be the next Secretary of Homeland Security, and Robert Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic, as the next Secretary of Health and Human Services.
• Florida Senator Macro Rubio is slated to be the next Secretary of State, FOX television channel presenter Pete Hegseth, the next Defense Secretary, and ex-Rep Tulsi Gabbard the next Director of National Intelligence.  
• Regarding the potential appointment of Treasury Secretary, several of Trump’s advisers have backed Scott Bessent, founder of the hedge fund Key Square Group and a key financial supporter of Trump’s campaigns.
• The Chinese Foreign Ministry extended its congratulations to Donald Trump on his election as the 47th U.S. President, stating that it “respects the choice of the American people.”
• China’s President Xi Jinping congratulated Trump on his victory and underlined that the U.S. and China should find the “right way to get along with each other.”

Mark the Essentials

• Following Trump’s victory, speculation has intensified regarding Robert Lighthizer’s potential return as U.S. Trade Representative (USTR). At present, no official confirmation has been made regarding the appointment, and he may even return in a position as trade and export control czar that sits atop USTR.
• Senator Marco Rubio, the nominee for Secretary of State, has a longstanding record of taking hardline stances on China. He previously sponsored the Uyghur Forced Labor Protection Act and has pushed for stricter export controls, higher tariffs on Chinese critical minerals, the removal of Chinese goods from de minimis protections, and the exclusion of vehicles with Chinese components from the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement.
• Similarly, Rep. Mike Waltz, who has been nominated as National Security Advisor, holds an aggressive stance on China. Waltz has advocated for a “whole-of-government approach for R&D” to counter China’s threats to U.S. security and currently sits on the House China Select Committee. 
• President-elect Donald Trump’s election victory is already influencing China’s economic policies. Analysts have suggested that Trump’s proposed tariff increases could potentially cause “huge damage” to China’s economy, prompting Beijing to consider the election outcome when determining the scale of its recent stimulus measures. Other analysts have mused that a potential “phase-two” deal between Beijing and the incoming Trump administration could lead to increased Chinese investment in the U.S., aligning with Trump’s emphasis on goods produced for American consumers being “produced in the U.S. using U.S. labor.” 
• In response to Donald Trump’s election as U.S. President, South Korean Trade Minister Cheong In-kyo stated that South Korean companies should consider “increasing direct investment and on-site production” in the United States if tariffs are raised. Simultaneously, ministers from several countries, including Canada, Mexico, the European Union and Thailand, expressed their willingness to strengthen collaboration with the incoming administration.

Keeping an Eye On…

• On January 20, 2025, the United States’ 45th president will also become its 47th president, with Donald Trump having swept his opposition across all the key battleground states. Trump won handsomely across several demographic segments—noncollege white folks; seniors; suburban voters—and gained important ground among Black and Latino male voters (although his popular vote tally budged upwards by a mere 1.5 million from 2020 to 75.6 million votes—Harris, by contrast, had an almost 9 million vote drop-off from Biden’s 81.2 million vote count). Ultimately, what lifted Trump and sank Harris was not just about Rust Belt jobs or socially conservative men from small-town America. Rather, it was about a cost-of-living challenge that cut across vast swathes of the American public, with inflation outpacing wage gains and leaving a significant number of Americans worse off than they were before the pandemic. Not until early 2024 did real median household incomes surpass its late-2019 number. By contrast, the first three years of Trump’s first presidency witnessed a double-digit rise in the median household income, with wages growing faster than at any time over the preceding Bush and Obama terms. There is a certain irony here for the Democrats to think through. In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s defeat to Trump was ascribed in part to the Obama administration’s lack of emphasis on running a “high pressure economy,” i.e., running the economy temporarily hotter than cyclical macroeconomic indicators would advise so as to reverse the adverse supply side effects that stemmed from the economy’s structural shortfall in aggregate demand (remember the super-low and even negative interest rates of the time). Indeed, in a notable speech in 2016, the then-Federal Reserve Chair and current Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen had emphasized the importance of a quick, coordinated and aggressive fiscal and monetary policy response following a recession as well as the need of policymakers to adopt a more accommodative stance during recoveries than would otherwise be called for under the traditional view that the economy’s supply capacity is largely independent of demand. Both ideas were pressed into service during the Biden years to recreate a “high pressure economy.” A massive US$1.9 trillion stimulus package (the American Rescue Plan) was enacted in May 2021 (on top of the two large COVID-related Trump stimulus injections of 2020), the Federal Reserve maintained an accommodative stance initially even as inflation wildly overshot, and the U.S. government continues to run to this day a massive fiscal deficit that has no precedent in non-crisis periods during peacetime. The “high pressure economy” did deliver solid growth and employment gains. It also delivered inflation, high interest rates, depressed real wages and a cost-of-living crisis, which were exacerbated no doubt by COVID supply chain snafus and Russia aggression-induced commodity price spikes. In the end, the “high pressure economy” delivered no better for Kamala Harris electorally than the demand-deficient economy did for Hillary Clinton. Be that as it may, America will come to rue in time the departure of the Biden team from office. Not since the Depression-era Great Deal programs did America have such an opportunity to spur the creation of major new industries, resurrect private investment, reimagine antitrust regulation to combat oligopolistic market concentration risks, and rejigger capitalism’s tools more broadly for socially inclusive ends. It is not clear now that some of the industrial policy and antitrust innovations will survive the second Trump administration or whether these introduced policies will have enough staying power to outlive Trump 2.0 and be resurrected under a future Democratic Party administration. At the end of the day, though, the American voter has spoken, and that voice must be respected.

Expanded Reading

• Trump Makes A Victor’s Return To Washington And Pledges A ‘Smooth’ Transition Of Power From Biden, AP News, November 13, 2024
• Key Advisers to Trump Back Bessent For Treasury Secretary, Bloomberg, November 12, 2024
• Rubio And Waltz Picks Put China Back At The Center Of US Foreign Policy, ABC News, November 12, 2024
• Politics Biden, Trump Set To Meet Wednesday In Oval Office, CBS, November 9, 2024
• Talk Of Lighthizer Return To USTR ‘Complete Bulls–t,’ Says One Insider, Politico, November 8, 2024
• Trump Has Not Asked Lighthizer To Reprise US Trade Chief Post, Sources Say, Reuters, November 8, 2024
• President Xi Jinping Sends Congratulatory Message To President-elect Of The United States Donald J. Trump , Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, November 7, 2024