Barak Obama was technically the first occupant of the Oval Office to have a smartphone.

He finally upgraded from a Blackberry in his last year in office.

But there's no doubt Donald Trump has led the way in turning his phone into a tool of presidential power.

The busiest single day for the first thumbs came in January during the impeachment hearings in Congress,

when he tweeted 142 times.

But the output from iPhone 1

can easily distract from what's going on inside it.

The five nanometer chips that power the later smartphones are at the

center of the struggle for dominance between the world's two biggest economies.

With 164 days to go, this is checks and balance.

There are a million nanometers in a millimeter, by the way.

I'm John Prido, the Economist's U.S. editor, and this is a podcast about the 2020 elections.

Each week we take one big theme for shaping American politics and explore it in depth.

Today, what do microchips tell us about what's happening to globalization? The Trump administration has been celebrating an announcement from the Taiwanese firm

T-SMC that it will build a semiconductor factory in Arizona.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said it was a boost for the country's economic independence

amid China's creeping dominance in tech.

California's Apple and China's Huawei both rely on T.S.M.C. to make phones.

A geopolitical tug of war is being fought over nanoscopic wafers of silicon.

In this episode, we'll look back at the moment economic

nationalists blame for America's industrial decline and as the coronavirus

stokes anti-China sentiment we'll ask whether so-called de-globalization will continue no matter who wins

...