He got rid of the most effective global efforts to contain China’s growth through the TPP. I know HN hates the TPP because of amorphous claims about IP, but flouting IP norms forms the entire basis of these actions by Trump, and the whole point of TPP’a IP protections (which HN hated, apparently) was to make sure China’s neighbors would not flout IP protections the way China did, giving private companies incentives to move manufacturing and research from China to the neighboring countries instead.
That would have been a broad ranging global effort to ensure China followed rules, that would have cost the US nothing (in fact other countries were making concessions to the US for it), and would not have required 2-3 years of barely legal efforts to contain 1 Chinese company and even there only in the US market, but would have instead affected all Chinese companies, non Chinese companies manufacturing in China, and not just the US market but also eastern Asian and Australasian markets.
So yeah, if by Trump did something you mean he dismantled an effort that would have been more effective by orders of magnitude and cost the US nothing but actually won it more friends in favor of a barely legal effort that is pissing off even allies that are not friendly to China and has taken 3 years to maybe impact 1 Chinese company, then sure.
Trump pulled out of the deal and decided to do a trade war instead.
You got a trade war because there was finally a US president willing to risk confrontation like the chinese are, who started calling out chinese practices like dumping steel in canada to kill the US steel industry.
A year ago people said trump was crazy for talking about chinese steel dumped in canada as a national security issue. Then you couldnt get n95 masks and the world realized things run out if you dont produce them and someone else makes them.
The trade war is a positive - the US-China relationship needs redefining. If you look at chinese influence campaings the chinese are well aware of US efforts to deal with orbitting allies and is pushing their own influence. Your ideas would have worked 15 years ago, maybe.
It would have incentivized manufacturing to leave China, along with a large share of all the western dollars currently feeding the regime.
Trump's strategy doesn't really seem to decouple us from China so much as it seems to invert the relationship.
He might deserve congratulations if his strategies made sense, but they seem more likely to hurt the US than China in the long run.
Simply doing something, anything, for the sake of having something be done is even worse than the status quo.
The actions they are taking are delaying tactics but do not change the fundamentals. In fact, blocking shipments of semiconductors may even hasten the rise of a competing Chinese industry.
I think being #1 is deeply embedded in the American psyche and it is shocking for them to even imagine otherwise (Edit: as we see in these very comments and the reactions...), which is actually a risk for world peace, IMHO.
To me this is all naked geopolitics, hardly fair and extremely risky. But finally America is transitioning to worrying about real problems rather than, say, the policy of treating shepherds in Afghanistan as a major threat in the Bush era.