«it’s incontrovertible that a billionaire who has a bunch of investments in China and wants to make more all of a sudden disrupted a normal congressional process that was going to restrict that investment with a bunch of lies from his media platform. And lo and behold, when the new funding bill emerged, the outbound investment feature was dropped. In fact, all traces of provisions related to China were removed from the bill.

Donald Trump preens as someone determined to “get tough” on China. But he’s empowered someone with serious business entanglements in China to seemingly serve as a barrier to any policies related to China over the next four years.

The current White House resident (remember him) picked up on this. In a statement, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre noted that “Republicans are breaking their word to support a bipartisan agreement that would lower prescription drug costs and make it harder to offshore jobs to China.” The prescription drug reference has to do with a major reform of pharmacy benefit managers, which was also taken out of the new bill.

So Donald Trump, alleged leader of the realignment of populist Republicans, scuttled a spending bill primarily to shield the richest man in the world’s investments in China and the profits of UnitedHealth Group, owners of the second-largest pharmacy benefit manager.»

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-12-20-government-shutting-down-elon-musk-factories-china/

Thank you, Mastodon, for turning me on to this.